The Ethical Individual: An Historical Alternative to Contemporary Conceptions of the Self

1996 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy R. McCready
Keyword(s):  
John Milton ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
The Self ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Historically Situated

In this article I offer an historically situated model of the self as an alternative to liberal, communitarian, and Foucauldian conceptions. Through the example of John Milton, I show that the conscience gave rise to a self that was jointly individual and ethical. By participating in public debates at the behest of his conscience, Milton recognized himself as an individual possessor of moral authority. Conscience thus liberated Milton from traditional identifications and beliefs as it bound him to act for his society. The self founded on conscience therefore differs from both communitarian and liberal variants. Moreover, whereas conscience in the Foucauldian account renders the self docile, it empowers the self in my account. I conclude that the self predicated on conscience challenges the divisions between private and public realms, self-regarding and prosocial actions, and self-creating and culturally determined persons.

scholarly journals Public Performance of Private Interviews: Reinserting the Self into the Family Narrative

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-52
Author(s):  
Alina Predescu
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Home Movies ◽  
Surgical Tool ◽  
Family Photographs ◽  
Family Narrative ◽  
The Family ◽  
Private And Public

Serban Oliver Tataru and Alfred Guzzetti are filmmakers that investigate on camera the role of memory in the construction of family history. They interview family members, gather old home movies and family photographs, and dig for public archival footage, in an effort to assume their position within a personal historical continuum, and to affirm their agency within their familial community. In their creative affirmation of generational subjectivity, they push against accepted familial narratives, and use the camera as a surgical tool that troubles lingering wounds beyond the surface of old images. In Anatomy of a Departure (2012), Romanian-German filmmaker Serban Oliver Tataru interviews his parents about their decision to emigrate from Ceausescu’s Romania while he was a teenager, scrutinizing on camera the conditions and consequence of a life-changing decision. While the dynamic of filming one’s own family is reminiscent of home movie tropes, and the tension built around sharing delicate memories reveals an intimacy usually intended to remain private, the film proposes a multilayered performance of the authorial self. As the film reveals a self-portrait set against the familial portrait (Marianne Hirsch), an inherent performative element acts as the necessary mediator between private and public, between ethic, aesthetic and politic. Negotiating between a restorative and a reflective nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), Tataru proposes a live performance of homecoming.

Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
The Self ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines some unanswered questions in John Stuart Mill's politics, especially with regards to bureaucracy, democracy, and liberty. These questions relate to what Mill thought about the bearing of the way India was governed on the way the United Kingdom should be governed; about the extent to which he had grown out of the anxiety about moral authority that permeated his essay “The Spirit of the Age”; and about the extent to which he felt that he had achieved a stable balance between a utilitarian concern with benevolent management and an “Athenian” concern with the self-assertive, self-critical, engaged, public-spirited, but independent-minded citizen. The chapter first considers Mill's views on the government of India and their implications for his ideas about empire, progress, and pluralism before discussing the issue of authority, along with his arguments in On Liberty.

Relationship between Self-Focused Attention and Mindfulness in People with and without Hallucination Proneness

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Perona-Garcelán ◽  
José M. García-Montes ◽  
Ana Mª López-Jiménez ◽  
Juan Francisco Rodríguez-Testal ◽  
Miguel Ruiz-Veguilla ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Correlational Analysis ◽  
Negative Association ◽  
The Self ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Healthy Participants

AbstractThe purpose of this work was to study the relationship between self-focused attention and mindfulness in participants prone to hallucinations and others who were not. A sample of 318 healthy participants, students at the universities of Sevilla and Almería, was given the Launay-Slade Hallucinations Scale-revised (LSHS-R, Bentall & Slade, 1985). Based on this sample, two groups were formed: participants with high (n = 55) and low proneness (n = 28) to hallucinations. Participants with a score higher than a standard deviation from the mean in the LSHS-R were included in the high proneness group, participants with a score lower than a standard deviation from the mean in the LSHR-R were included in the second one. All participants were also given the Self-Absorption Scale (SAS, McKenzie & Hoyle, 2008) and the Southampton Mindfulness Questionnaire (SMQ, Chadwick et al., 2008). The results showed that participants with high hallucination proneness had significantly higher levels of public (t(80) = 6.81, p < .001) and private (t(77) = 7.39, p < .001) self-focused attention and lower levels of mindfulness (t(81) = -4.56, p < .001) than participants in the group with low hallucination proneness. A correlational analysis showed a negative association between self-focused attention (private and public) and mindfulness (r = -0.23, p < .001; r = -0.38, p < .001 respectively). Finally, mindfulness was found to partly mediate between self-focused attention and hallucination proneness. The importance of self-focused attention and mindfulness in understanding the etiology of hallucinations discussed and suggest some approaches to their treatment.

scholarly journals MF Husain’s Hindi Autobiography Em. Ef. Husain kī kahānī apnī zubānī

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Consolaro
Keyword(s):  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Cultural Artefact ◽  
The World ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Subject

Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz’s notion of the body as a socio-cultural artefact and the exterior of the subject bodies as psychically constructed, and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic identities, in this article I introduce world-renowned Indian painter MF Husain’s verbal and visual autobiography Em. Ef. Husen kī kahānī apnī zubānī as a series of sketches of a performative self, surfing the world in space and time. Bodies and spaces are envisioned as “assemblages or collections of parts” in constant movement, crossing borders and creating relationships with other selves and other spaces. People and places become a catalyst for manifestations of the self in art – MF Husain being foremost a painter – and eventually also in literature. I look for strategies that MF Husain uses in order to construct or deconstruct the self through crossings and linkages. I try to investigate how the self is performed inside and outside private and public spaces, how the complex (sometimes even contradictory) relationship between self and community is portrayed, and how this autobiography does articulate notions of (imagined) community/ies, nationalism, transnational subjectivity, nostalgia.

The Home, Nations and Empires, and Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Imperial Identity ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The One

This book explores ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The chapters focus on two related spaces: the domestic interior and its imagery, and exhibitions and museums that display both national/imperial identity and the otherness that lurks beyond a country’s borders. What is revealed is that the same tension operates in these private and public realms; namely, that between identification and self-projection, on the one hand, and alienation, otherness and objectification on the other. In uncovering this, the authors show that the self, the citizen/society and the other are realities that are constantly being asserted, defined and objectified. This takes place, they demonstrate, in a ceaseless dynamic of projection versus alienation, and intimacy versus distancing.

Developing Self-Awareness

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Growth Mindset ◽  
Community Member ◽  
The Self ◽  
Coordinated Management Of Meaning ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Self As Instrument ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship

Understanding the relationship between the particular and the general is pivotal to understand and bring about social change. In this chapter, the authors focus on the development of self-awareness and using “self as instrument of change.” They have evidenced that as people become aware of their self-transformation, their impetus to transform their most immediate community increases. Also, when the self-transformation of a community member is evidenced by the rest, that person is conceived as possessing a moral authority that legitimizes his or her role as a leader. In fact, when working in communities transitioning out of conflict, we need to be the best version of who we are so that we can relate with authenticity to develop trusting relationships. The authors draw from the concept of mystery included in the coordinated management of meaning (CMM) theory, as well as from Carol Dweck's discussion on the difference between growth mindset and fixed mindset.

Virgil’s Eclogues as Meditation

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-112
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Kachuck
Keyword(s):  
John Milton ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
Social Reciprocity ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Central Social

This chapter argues that Virgil’s Eclogues give literary form to Rome’s solitary sphere and make solitude their central social and literary problem. A meditation on Virgil’s use of the verb meditari (“to meditate, contemplate, practice”) and on the fourth Eclogue provides background for a formulation of Virgil’s model of “loveful reading” that, in its solitude, nuances readings of the Eclogues as representing dreams of social reciprocity and communal (pastoral) humanism. Drawing on multiple genealogical and comparative sources, and the whole of the Eclogues book, it argues that the first, fifth, and tenth Eclogues privilege the solitary over the private and public. Finally, it shows how Virgil confounds the commonplace assignment of the pastoral of solitude to later literary periods, in ways appreciated by two of Virgil’s closest readers: John Milton and Andrew Marvell.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Mirjam Lücking
Keyword(s):  
Arab World ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Dress Codes ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Conservative Turn

This chapter highlights how Indonesians regard for the Arab world as Islamic religiosity increased in the private and public life. It explains the significance of Islamic religiosity regarding social changes in Indonesia since its transition from autocracy to democracy at the close of the millennium. It also points out the intensified adherence to religious rules, changing dress codes, and new voices in political Islam as a “conservative turn.” The chapter identifies radical representatives within the conservative turn that demand for Islamic praxis to be purified, turning toward Wahhabi interpretations of Islam. It analyzes Orientalizations and Occidentalisms with a focus on South–South transnational linkages and dynamics of Othering in contexts where the Other constitutes part of the Self.

“La solitude ajoute à l’ardeur du désir”: Dangerous Isolation in Les Liaisons dangereuses

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-511
Author(s):  
Marine Ganofsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Real ◽  
Private And Public

In Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), the motif of solitude, from conventual seclusion to virtuous retreats and libertine isolation, is as much a contributor to the characters’ downfall as the dangerous liaisons advertised in the novel’s title. Engaging the eighteenth-century discourse on solitude, I argue that Les Liaisons dangereuses illustrates the period’s redefinition of the private and public spheres, the Enlightenment’s secularization of the notion of retreat, and its understanding of the Self as the real source of one’s temptation. Solitude in Les Liaisons dangereuses is reconfigured as a space where inner desires can surface; however, such revelations often menace one’s happiness. Analyzing the representation of the characters’ physical seclusion, of their strategic retreats, and of their psychological isolation allows me to explore how Laclos’s representation of solitude as perilous stems from the conviction that, in a period intent on frustrating an individual’s natural drives, the most dangerous liaison one can have is with oneself.

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