scholarly journals The importance of imagination and subjective knowledge: The evolution of art and religion as symbolic representations of feelings, experiences, and beliefs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie van Mulukom ◽  
Armin W. Geertz
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Subjective Knowledge ◽  
Symbolic Representations ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Narrative Processing ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Symbolic Systems ◽  
Religion And Art ◽  
The Human Condition

Religion and art have been incredibly important in human evolution but, we argue, are often not taken seriously as an important source of knowledge. In this article, we propose that the arts and religions are symbolic systems that capture subjective knowledge, or knowledge about the world that is specific to human experience or the human condition, both concerning the self (existential subjective knowledge) and others (social subjective knowledge). Forms of this knowledge comprise feelings, experiences, and beliefs, which can arise from naturally occurring experiences or can be induced through religious rituals and artistic performances. Subjective knowledge is processed through subjective cognition – experiential or intuitive thinking, narrative processing, and meaning-making. Individual differences in subjective cognition are proposed to lie in absorption, or the propensity of individuals to allow for a state of the experiential, more porous self, through reduced boundaries of the rational, bounded self. This in turn allows for an immersive focus on sensory inputs, and becoming connected to something bigger than oneself, a state that is especially conducive to providing meaning and new perspectives with regards to the human condition. Together, forms of subjective knowledge make up symbolic systems that feed into overarching subjective knowledge systems, or cultures and worldviews. Thus, religion and art has allowed for subjective knowledge to become represented in symbols and artefacts, which renders the subjective knowledge concrete, memorable and shareable.

The Contribution of Painting to Children's Cognitive Development

1982 ◽  
Vol 164 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliot W. Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Development ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Qualitative Changes ◽  
The Human Condition

This article explores the grounds for the belief generally held that there are benefits to be derived by children from art activity. It describes nine consequences or potential consequences of art activity which lead to qualitative changes in the child's ability to think and perceive. Through art children learn that the world itself can be regarded as a source of aesthetic experience and as a pool of expressive form. The author concludes that since some aspects of artistic thinking are inherent in the human condition whereas others are culturally determined, education in the arts is one vehicle through which culture is brought to nature. Through this wedding, children's cognitive development will be enhanced.

scholarly journals James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 445 pages. Price not given.

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-78
Author(s):  
Faisal Bari
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Not Given ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Right ◽  
Peasant Resistance ◽  
The Human Condition

The key question addressed in the book is: Why have so many large-scale schemes to improve the human condition failed so badly? And James Scott is the right person to have asked this question. Scott is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University. He is also the author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1977), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1987), and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1992). All of the above have given him an excellent understanding of the nature of conflict in societies and the means of survival for the poor. Often the protagonists in the conflict have been people on one side and governments on the other. This is essential background for the book under review.

Perception as Media: Reconsidering the Arts & Neurotechnology

Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Jess Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Neural Decoding ◽  
Brain Computer Interfaces ◽  
Perceptual Awareness ◽  
Computer Interfaces ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Human Condition

Recent developments in neurotechnology raise the possibility of directly reading out - or sending input into - perceptual awareness. Using Marshal McLuhan's statement “the content of any medium is another medium” as a starting point, the author explores the potential for Neural Decoding and Brain-Computer Interfaces to support a medium of awareness. This paper intends to open a set of questions reconsidering ongoing issues in phenomenology and the arts. If art addresses the human condition, then we could say it is essential for art to address our growing integration with external—and increasingly internal - technology.

scholarly journals Writing, painting, creating: How can the arts augment psychiatry training?

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Jennifer Nicole Harris
Keyword(s):  
Medical School ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Psychiatry Training ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Poor Recruitment ◽  
The Human Condition

The humanities have recently enjoyed a position in medical school curriculums, but once a graduated doctor, its importance and value appears to diminish in the eyes of the profession. Psychiatry, as the study of the human condition where one must identify the inner worlds of patients, lends itself to creative pursuits encompassing observation and communication.  As a specialty, psychiatry continues to suffer stigmatised opinions within the medical profession and poor recruitment across many countries. Incorporating the humanities, including literature, music and art into the training of postgraduate doctors could remedy tired perspectives and busy working lives, as well as providing new and dynamic ways to learn about and connect with patients on a more profound level.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

Das Internet der Tiere: Natur 4.0 und die conditio humana

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera
Keyword(s):  
Industry 4.0 ◽  
Industrie 4.0 ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Conditio Humana ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Human Condition

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "

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