scholarly journals Worlds apart: Marx, Marcuse and creative engagement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca van der Post
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Early Account ◽  
Historical Moment

Marx’s early account of socialism as the simultaneous liberation of mankind and nature holds creativity to be mankind’s defining and trans-historical characteristic and the locus of human freedom. Yet, as I argue, Marx’s creativity is predicated upon subject-object relations of domination that engender a pathological relationship between humans and nature, thereby militating against true freedom. This paper will explore Marcuse’s attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s account and will find that Marcuse fails to resolve the crucial tension between subject and object, while his model of freedom contains the possibility for an escalation in the very violations of nature that his account seeks to overcome. Finally, I argue that creative processes and creative engagement suggest a way to resolve the tension in Marx’s account of human nature, while offering us a vantage point from which to critique and subvert the brutality of our own historical moment.

scholarly journals Worlds apart: Marx, Marcuse and creative engagement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca van der Post
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Early Account ◽  
Historical Moment

Marx’s early account of socialism as the simultaneous liberation of mankind and nature holds creativity to be mankind’s defining and trans-historical characteristic and the locus of human freedom. Yet, as I argue, Marx’s creativity is predicated upon subject-object relations of domination that engender a pathological relationship between humans and nature, thereby militating against true freedom. This paper will explore Marcuse’s attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s account and will find that Marcuse fails to resolve the crucial tension between subject and object, while his model of freedom contains the possibility for an escalation in the very violations of nature that his account seeks to overcome. Finally, I argue that creative processes and creative engagement suggest a way to resolve the tension in Marx’s account of human nature, while offering us a vantage point from which to critique and subvert the brutality of our own historical moment.

‘Veluti in speculum’: The twilight of the castrato

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Natural Expression

The final performances of castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti in London in the late 1820s constitute a particularly rich vantage point from which to explore why the castrato was eventually forced from the operatic stage. What does this historical moment have to say about shifts in vocal style and audience expectations? Why did the question of castration become so loaded under ‘Romantic’ conditions? This article constructs a speculative theoretical framework by bringing together recent insights in the history of vocal science, histories of gender and subjectivity, the history of listening and opera studies. Velluti's hostile reception in the London press is surveyed in detail, alongside a historically informed examination of his vocal manner. Evidence suggests that the castrato quickly became an unthinkable figure, falling from grace in the wake of embodied conceptions of vocality and ‘natural’ expression, newly dominant ideas that projected him beyond prevailing notions of human nature.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Jansenist Augustinianism and the Springs of Pastoral Rigorism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Human Liberty

The central controversy surrounding Jansenism concerned its alleged heterodoxy in respect to divine grace and human liberty. Five propositions regarding fallen human nature, the operation of grace, and the ability of man to cooperate with it were extracted from Jansen’s Augustinus, and condemned by Innocent X in 1653. The Jansenists denied that they maintained the propositions in the condemned sense. Their position was framed against a teaching developed by Molina and other Jesuits (analysed in section II), which, they claimed, attributed so much power to fallen nature as to fall into Pelagianism. The chapter balances accounts which relate the Jansenists’ moral rigorism wholly to their pessimistic assessment of human nature and their predestinarianism. They aimed to establish human freedom and the responsibility of each individual for his own conversion, and the counterpoint to their view of the fall was a mystical optimism regarding the destiny of nature under grace.

scholarly journals Finite in Infinity

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-109
Author(s):  
Hannah Laurens
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Metaphysical Theory

One of the main themes in Spinoza’s Ethics is the issue of human freedom: What does it consist in and how may it be attained? Spinoza’s ethical views crucially depend on his metaphysical theory, and this close connection provides the answer to several central questions concerning Spinoza’s conception of human freedom. Firstly, how can we accommodate human freedom within Spinoza’s necessitarianism—in the context of which Spinoza rejects the notion of a free will? Secondly, how can humans, as merely finite beings, genuinely attain freedom? Can Spinoza defend his claim that we may even attain blessedness? I will argue that these questions are answered by appeal to a twofold in human nature. According to Spinoza, we are finite in infinity.

Bernard Lonergan e a Probabilidade Emergente

2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 1727-1742
Author(s):  
Mendo Castro Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Bernard Lonergan ◽  
Heuristic Model ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Generalized Probability ◽  
The Way

In Insight, an essay on human understanding, (1957, 1st edition) Lonergan presents a heuristic model of emerging probability in order to define, explain and extract norms from the dynamism common to all nature, including human nature, a dynamism that mirrors the reality of intellection. Continuity between different levels of nature discloses a directed, upward, but indeterminate dynamism of the emerging generalized probability. In addition to the ethical consequences that he elaborates, Lonergan remains in an open hermeneutic framework, beyond being proportionate to discursive reason; he opens the way for a surprising final manifestation of this universal dynamism through what he calls transcendent conjugated forms of generalized probability emerging – faith, hope and charity – that are proposed to human freedom.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-184
Author(s):  
He Bian
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Modern China ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Local Society ◽  
The Government ◽  
Shed Light

This concluding chapter turns to developments in the bencao tradition after the fall of Qing China and considers the broader implications of this study on modern China. It asserts that while the making of the bencao pharmacopeia had long faded from the government-sponsored cultural stage, the power of pharmaceutical objecthood endured in less centralized expressions. The popularization of pharmaceutical culture mirrored the efforts of local communities’ efforts to reclaim moral agency in the wake of the traumatic Taiping Wars (1852–1864) and the Arrow War (1856–1860). Pharmacists joined forces with resident gentry, clergy, and a growing contingent of Confucian activists to rebuild local society and reshape national politics. The struggle for authority over the nature of drugs thus continues to shed light on the complex interplay among knowledge, power, and ethics in modern China; pharmacy remains a good vantage point from which to observe the perennial search for consensus over the political administration of human nature.

scholarly journals Beyond Personalist Virtue Ethics: Transcendental Anthropology and its Implications for Interpersonal Communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kleio Akrivou ◽  
Manuel Joaquín Fernández González
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Communication Ethics ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Nature And Society

There is a need of deeper understanding of what human beings are for facing adequately global challenges. The aim of this article is to point to the possible contributions that transcendental anthropology would represent for complementing and expanding the valuable, but still incomplete solutions put forward by personalist virtue ethics to face these challenges. In particular, the question of the moral motivation and the complex relations between virtue and freedom are addressed, taking as a starting point the understanding of the uniqueness of the personal act-of-being and the transcendentality of human freedom, which is in dialogue with human nature and society, but ultimately not subdued to none of them. Some implications of the transcendental anthropology in the field of interpersonal communication ethics are put forward.

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