Nihilistic Thinking as the Self-Will of the Mind and the Projects of Its Overcoming

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Irina N. Sidorenko
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Spatial Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Radical Transformation

 The author analyzes the conceptions of ontological nihilism in the works of S. Kierkegaard, F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, E. Jünger. On the basis of this analysis, violence is defined as a manifestation of nihilism, of the “will to nothingness” and hypertrophy of the self-will of man. The article demonstrates the importance of the problem of nihilism. The nihilistic thinking of modern man is expressed in the attitude toward a radical transformation of the world from the position of his “absolute” righteousness. The paradox of the current situation is that there is the reverse side of this transformative activity, when there is only the appearance of action and the dilution of responsibility. Confidence in the rightness of own views and beliefs increases the risk of the violent imposition of own vision of reality. Historical and philosophical reconstruction of the conceptions of nihilism allowed to reveal the following projects of its comprehension and resolution: (1) the project of “positing of values,” which consists in the transformation of the evaluation, which is understood as another perspective of positing values, leading to the affirmation of being; (2) the project of overcoming nihilism from the space of temporality, carried out through the resoluteness to accept the historicity of own existence; (3) the project of overcoming nihilism as the oblivion of being from the spatial perspective of the “line,” allowing to realize the “glimpse” of being. The author concludes that it is impossible to solve the problem of violence and its various forms of its manifestation without overcoming “ontological nihilism.” Significant role in solving the problem of ontological violence is assigned to philosophy as a critical and responsible form of thinking, which is capable to help a person to bear the burden of the world, to provide meanings and affirm being, as well as to unite people and resist the fundamentalist claims of exclusivity and rightness.

Jonathan Edwards on the Sense of the Heart

1948 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Miller
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Work ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

The Heterocosmic Self: Analogy, Temporality and Structural Couplings in Proust’s Swann’s Way

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Marco Bernini
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
Extended Self ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

The idea of a distribution of the mind into the world has been largely considered as an empowering of the mind’s domain, an enlargement of its cognitive territory (a cognitive positivity). Experientially, however, it might generate a feeling of disconcerting fluidity or even an anxiety of groundlessness (an ontological concern), especially if we apply the idea of distribution to the self. What if we consider the self too as unbounded, extended and constantly constituted by ever-changing structural couplings with the world? This chapter focuses on the consequences of this question as explored by Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. If extended and enactive frameworks can provide important insights on Proust’s literary endeavour, Proust’s devious use of analogies and his focus on analogical experiences as tell-tale markers of the extended self can offer back to cognitive science new avenues of research about phenomenological and ontological aspects related to extended or enactive models of mind, memory, self and cognition.

How Is Strength of the Will Possible? Concerning Francis of Marchia and the Act of the Will

Vivarium ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-183
Author(s):  
Andrea Robiglio
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Weakness Of Will ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

AbstractFrancis of Marchia dealt at length in several different contexts with the nature of the will and willing. Here I examine just one of those discussions: the possibility for the will to go against reason's final judgment, a topic related to weakness of will and the source of sin. Marchia is clearly of a voluntaristic bent, holding that the will can indeed act against the determination of reason. After examining Marchia's argumentation for his position, I explore some of the background to Marchia's view in a distinctively later medieval understanding of the human mind as a system of internal acts and dispositions, with the possibility that several of them belong to the same faculty simultaneously. This increasingly complex conceptualisation of the mind mirrors a new, more complex conceptualization of the "Self".

scholarly journals “Uproar in the Echo”: Browning's Vitalist Beginnings

1987 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 91-103
Author(s):  
Leslie White
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Main Line ◽  
George Bernard Shaw ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Élan Vital ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
Willed Action ◽  
Individual Human

In letters to Mrs. Ernest Benzon and Mrs. Thomas FitzGerald, Browning claims affinity with the great philosopher of the Will, Schopenhauer, and asserts that elements of vitalism are the “substratum” of his life and work. These letters confirm the poet's place in the line of vitalist thought shaped by Schopenhauer, the English Romantics, and Carlyle and further developed by Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Henri Bergson, and D. H. Lawrence. Vitalism resists precise definition; each theorist advances a singular terminology and application. Schopenhauer's vitalism may be understood from his concept of cosmic Will; Carlyle's from the essential presence of energy, movement, and change in the world. Bergson used the term élan vital and Lawrence such characteristically vague phrases as “sense of truth” and “supreme impulse” to express faith in forces operating beneath or hovering above the surface of life. Broadly put, when a rational orientation to the world ceased to be adequate, when rationalism devolved into a falsification of reality's authentic energy, major vitalists came into existence and posited as the true reality a primitive, universal force of which everything in that reality is an objectification. Unlike other vitalists in the English tradition, such as Blake and Lawrence, Browning was not comfortable with cosmic images. His vitalism breaks from the main line to focus on the individual human will, which he saw as an intuitive impulse and as a means to realize the self and locate its place in the world. For Browning, the comprehension of life's vital movement lay in the dynamic energy of willed action.

The Solution

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Philosophical Question ◽  
Buddhist Practice ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

This chapter examines two general strands in Buddhism: philosophy and practice. Philosophy involves understanding the nature of the world and the mind. It involves careful examination, reasoning, and analysis of the world in general and the self in particular. Meanwhile, practice involves specific techniques to bring about a change in how we respond to the world. It aims at changing mental habits and ways of experiencing the world. These two aspects can, and often are, discussed separately. This is no surprise given how monumental each task is; people sometimes devote their entire lives to only one philosophical question or Buddhist practice. Nevertheless, these two aspects do inform each other. Philosophy helps to establish the aim of practice. Practice, on the other hand, can help one to have certain experiences which can, in turn, inform ideas about how the world works.

Freedom and Causality

Philosophy ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 34 (130) ◽  
pp. 193-203
Author(s):  
E. P. Papanoutsos
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Intellectual Capital ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
Principle Of Causality ◽  
The Mind

The strongest argument which convinced adherents of determinism put forward is that the admission of freedom of the will does away with the principle of causality within the sphere of personal existence, and makes human activity incomprehensible. “I understand” and “I explain” mean: I apprehend the presentations of experience in terms of the basic forms of thought, and in this way I assimilate them, I register them in the system of knowledge which makes up my intellectual capital. One of these forms of thought, and one of the very highest importance, is the concept of causality: without it the mind would remain perpetually bemused before an orderless world of phenomena, displaying no rhyme or reason, like the world of magic or that of dreams. If, therefore, freedom of the will excludes a principle on which our intellectual well-being depends so “much, it must be rejected by the philosophical mind and given no place amongst the truths which that mind recognizes. There is a lasting validity in Immanuel Kant's observation:“If we grant that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in the strictest sense) and if at the same time we grant that speculative reason has proved that such freedom does not allow of being thought, then the former supposition— that made on behalf of morality—would have to give way to this other contention, the opposite of which involves a palpable contradiction.”.

scholarly journals Remarkable Reframing

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Mental Structure ◽  
International Mediation ◽  
The World ◽  
National University ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Negative Sentiment

This paper arises from a presentation at the International Mediation and Restorative Practice Conference held at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth on 5th September 2014. The topic is the technique known as reframing. To reframe is to bring about a change in someone’s mental perspective by altering their tacit underlying viewpoint to create different meaning. It is an attempt to release the parties from a blame and counter-blame cycle, and to focus on more useful ways of viewing the conflict. It is not about over-looking or evading some negative sentiment - this needs to be included to maintain the context. What reframing does, however, is to introduce new meaning, co-existent with the negative perspective, which shifts the mind-set towards a more constructive future. A ‘frame’ is a cognitive shortcut that people use to make sense of the world. It is a complex mental structure of unquestioned beliefs, values and ideas that is used to simplify our understanding of the world around us and thus to infer meaning. If a part of that frame is changed – for example through self-reflection, education or reframing - then the inferred meaning may also change. When parties are in conflict their frames help them to interpret what has happened, what the intentions of the other party are, and their own role in what has taken place. This is usually positively disposed to the self and negatively disposed to the other. This lens, or frame, provides meaning for the conflict. Reframing upsets this frame and introduces a different, and potentially more helpful way to look at the conflict so that the parties will work on resolution rather than being stuck on set, negative, unproductive or toxic ways of viewing matters, or being defensive and closed-minded.

The Self-Awareness of the Mind: Phenomenal World and the Mind Beyond

Diogenes ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-25
Author(s):  
Ja-Kyoung Han
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Phenomenal World ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The World ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Conceptual Language

What we regard as real are the objects of the phenomenal world which we perceive. We regard those that we see objectively, as in the third person perspective, as real. What then is the mind that perceives the world? Is it possible for us to realize the very mind that perceives the world? This article discusses the existence of the world perceived by the mind in order to deal with the existence of the mind which perceives the world and the knowability of the mind. Phenomenal world is a perceptual world which is a fictitious world constructed by our conceptual language system. And the base of the fictitious phenomenal world, the object itself, is emptiness. The emptiness is the emptiness of the mind that perceives and constructs the world. Thus, the awareness of the emptiness of the world is the self-awareness of the mind. Since the emptiness of my mind is the same emptiness of all other beings, the mind is the capacity to sympathize with the whole world, the universal mind, One-mind. Every man is aware of oneself as One-mind. “Gong-juk-young-ji” or the “original enlightenment” of Buddhism is the self-awareness of the mind as emptiness.

Semantic Pragmatism and A Priori Knawledge (or ‘Yes we could all be brains in a vat’)

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Jackman
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Acceptability ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Brain In A Vat

Hilary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, he originally introduced his brain in a vat scenario to help illustrate a point about the ‘mind/world relationship.’ In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's discussion has already inspired a substantial body of criticism, but it will be argued here that these criticisms fail to capture the central problem with his argument. Indeed, it will be shown that, rather than simply following from his semantic externalism, Putnam's conclusions about the self-refuting character of the brain in a vat hypothesis are actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world.

scholarly journals La ‘faille’ chez Paul Ricœur. De l’identité symbolique et narrative, à l’identité gestuelle et langagière

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-89
Author(s):  
Guilhem Causse
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Paul Ricœur

In Fallible man, Ricœur discovers a faille (fault, breach, rift) in the heart of man. Due to this faille, man is fragile: he has to mediate between himself and the world. This mediation puts man at risk of losing himself. Thus, fragile man is also fallible. In Oneself as Another, Ricœur returns to this faille that passes through the heart of the self, between idem and ipse, giving access to the alter. This image, the faille, guides Ricœur in each of these two texts. It gives us access to their continuity but also to the gap that separates one from the other. But if this image has inspired Ricœur, it also gives us the opportunity to criticize his work. Re-reading the Symbolism of Evil, we will highlight a dimension of man little explored by Ricœur and that our current situation pushes us to rediscover: the body and gesture.

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