Fictions of the Self and Nature: Reading Romanticism in Saul Bellow

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Rural Environment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Breast ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
American Romanticism

This chapter examines how Bellow advocates an intuitive Romantic knowledge in Herzog (1964), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970) and Ravelstein (1999) that recognises that the sacrosanct resides in the ordinary nature of things and teaches us that we have wider communal obligations to one another as fellow human beings. Such obligations in Bellow’s fiction, especially Herzog, recall William Blake’s emphasis on the divine within the human breast and the possibility of a Wordsworthian communion with nature. British and American Romanticism were decisive in shaping his aesthetic vision of the relations between the self and the urban and rural environment. Bellow’s brand of Romanticism is read as indebted to Emersonian and Wordsworthian reflections on the interconnection between the visionary and the natural world, as well as moving towards a darker, sceptical, even Shelleyan sensibility.

scholarly journals The Nature-Human Relationship: An Ecocritical Reading of Self in Keats’ Poem

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
Rajiv Gautam
Keyword(s):  
Positive Attitude ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Single Entity ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Do So ◽  
Arne Næss ◽  
Arne Naess

This study analyzes the fusion of self and nature in John Keats's ode "Ode to a Nightingale" from ecocritical perspective. To do so, the ecocritical insights envisioned by Arne Naess, Bill Devall, George Sessions and Timothy W. Luke have been used as theoretical parameters to analyze the primary text. As the focus of the deep ecological trend, the uniformity between the human self and nature is represented in this text. This uniformity restores the significance of realizing the self with nature. This realization leads to the fusion. The fusion combines harmonious relationship between the self and nature to form a single entity. Due to this process, the selected primary text merges human beings and natural sublimity by means of a nightingale bird. When human beings cannot make positive attitude towards nature and act accordingly, their self does not get chance to be attached with nature. Nature is essential for all entities. The destruction of natural world causes the destruction of self. This destruction gets a solution only when there arises symbiotic bonding between human beings and nature. This bonding adds new knowledge in the existing scholarship being itself different from the previous research works.

Out of the Dreamtime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Abrahamic Religions ◽  
Scientific Terms ◽  
Traditional Cultures

Chapter 2 diverges from science to follow some primordial strands of thought on origins. An intimate, participatory universe was anticipated before human beings began to articulate worldviews in philosophic or scientific terms. Our search for the fractal self begins by tracing prototypes recorded in myths and oral histories. Anthropologists, such as Levy-Bruhl, concluded that people in remote traditional cultures understood themselves as embedded with nature. Their demigods, such as Coyote, Maui, Hermes, and Dionysus, roamed their environs and instigated changes and events for good or ill. Shamans interpreted and engaged natural forces and negotiated with nature on behalf of humans. Such figures embodied qualities of the fractal self. The break came in the West. Early cosmogonies featured characters such as Gaia and Ouranos, avatars of intimacy with nature and exalted authority respectively. However, as influenced by Plato and Aristotle the development of Abrahamic religions situated humans apart from the rest of nature and under the rule of an omnipotent, transcendent God. The identity of the self at one with nature ultimately subsided and was brutally suppressed in much of the world. However, Daoism and Buddhism remained attuned with ideas of humanity as deeply interdependent with the natural world.

Wer täuscht wen?

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Daniel Strassberg
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Narrative Context ◽  
Everyday Knowledge

The insight that human beings are prone to deceive themselves is part of our everyday knowledge of human nature. Even so, if deceiving someone means to deliberately misrepresent something to him, it is difficult to understand how it is possible to deceive yourself. This paper tries to address this difficulty by means of a narrative approach. Self-deception is conceived as a change of the narrative context by means of which the same fact appears in a different light. On these grounds, depending on whether the self-deceiver adopts an ironic attitude to his self-deception or not, it is also possible to distinguish between a morally inexcusable self-deception and a morally indifferent one.

The Goodness of Home

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Marandiuc
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Middle Term ◽  
Human Love ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Theological Argument

The question of what home means and how it relates to subjectivity has fresh urgency in light of pervasive contemporary migration, which ruptures the human self, and painful relational poverty, which characterizes much of modern life. Yet the Augustinian heritage that situates true home and right attachment outside this world has clouded theological conceptualizations of earthly belonging. This book engages this neglected topic and argues for the goodness of home, which it construes relationally rather than spatially. In dialogue with research in the neuroscience of attachment theory and contemporary constructions of the self, the book advances a theological argument for the function of love attachments as sources of subjectivity and enablers of human freedom. The book shows that paradoxically the depth of human belonging—thus, dependence—is directly proportional to the strength of human agency—hence, independence. Building on Søren Kierkegaard’s imagery alongside other sources, the book depicts human love as interwoven with the infinite streams of divine love, forming a sacramental site for God’s presence, and playing a constitutive role in the making of the self. The book portrays the self both as gifted from God in inchoate form and as engaged in continuous, albeit nonlinear becoming via experiences of human love. The Holy Spirit indwells the attachment space between human beings as a middle term preventing its implosion or dissolution and conferring a stability that befits the concept of home. The interstitial space between loving human persons subsists both anthropologically and pneumatologically and generates the self’s home.

The Measure of Greatness

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Moral Nature ◽  
Complex Trajectory ◽  
The Many ◽  
Human Excellence ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

Magnanimity is a virtue that has led many lives. Foregrounded early on by Plato as the philosophical virtue par excellence, it became one of the crown jewels in Aristotle’s account of human excellence and was accorded an equally salient place by other ancient thinkers. One of the most distinctive elements of the ancient tradition to filter into the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, it sparked important intellectual engagements there and went on to carve deep tracks through several later philosophies that inherited from this tradition. Under changing names, under reworked forms, it continued to breathe in the thought of Descartes and Hume, Kant and Nietzsche, and their successors. Its many lives have been joined by important continuities. Yet they have also been fragmented by discontinuities—discontinuities reflecting larger shifts in ethical perspectives and competing answers to questions about the nature of the good life, the moral nature of human beings, and their relationship to the social and natural world they inhabit. They have also been punctuated by moments of controversy in which the greatness of this vision of human greatness has itself been called into doubt. This volume provides a window to the complex trajectory of a virtue whose glitter has at times been as heady as it has been divisive. By exploring the many lives it has lived, we will be in a better position to decide whether and why this is a virtue we might still want to make central to our own ethical lives.

scholarly journals Intergroup Dialogues in the Landscape of Digital Societies: How Does the Dialogical Self Affect Intercultural Relations in Online Contexts?

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Chiara Imperato ◽  
Tiziana Mancini
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
The Self ◽  
Intergroup Bias ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intercultural Relations ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Dialogical Self ◽  
Prejudice And Discrimination ◽  
Theory Research

The effects of intergroup dialogues on intercultural relations in digital societies and the growing conflict, inflammatory and hate speech phenomena characterizing these environments are receiving increasing attention in socio-psychological studies. Based on Allport’s contact theory, scholars have shown that online intercultural contact reduces ethnic prejudice and discrimination, although it is not yet clear when and how this occurs. By analyzing the role of the Dialogical Self in online intercultural dialogues, we aim to understand how individuals position themselves and others at three levels of inclusiveness—personal, social, and human—and how this process is associated with attitudes towards the interlocutor, intergroup bias and prejudice, whilst also considering the inclusion of the Other in the Self and ethnic/racial identity. An experimental procedure was administered via the Qualtrics platform, and data were collected among 118 undergraduate Italian students through an anonymous questionnaire. From ANOVA and moderation analysis, it emerged that the social level of inclusiveness was positively associated with ethnic/racial identity and intergroup bias. Furthermore, the human level of inclusiveness was associated with the inclusion of the Other in the Self and ethnic/racial identity, and unexpectedly, also with intergroup bias. We conclude that when people interact online as “human beings”, the positive effect of online dialogue fails, hindering the differentiation processes necessary to define one’s own and the interlocutor’s identities. We discuss the effects of intercultural dialogue in the landscape of digital societies and the relevance of our findings for theory, research and practice.

scholarly journals As palavras e os bichos: sobre o lugar do homem no jogo das representações científicas | The words and the beasts: on the place of man in the game of scientific representations

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milla Benicio
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Scientific Representations ◽  
Complex Transformation ◽  
The Creation

RESUMO O principal objetivo deste artigo é traçar o itinerário científico e filosófico que permitiu à modernidade a criação de um novo campo de visibilidade dentro da ciência, enfraqueceu o antigo pressuposto da centralidade do homem em relação aos demais seres e levou a uma complexa transformação nas relações do homem com o mundo natural. Nosso foco será, portanto, a grande reorganização epistemológica e cultural do Ocidente, cujas quebras de paradigmas revolucionaram não apenas as noções ligadas à natureza, mas, principalmente, ao papel do homem nesse cenário.Palavras-chave: Reorganização Epistemológica; Homem; Mundo Natural.      ABSTRACT This article aims to draw the scientific and philosophical route which allowed to modernity the creation of a new field of visibility within science. This field weakened the old assumption of the centrality of human beings in relation to other and led to a complex transformation in human relationships with the natural world. Our focus will therefore be the major epistemological reorganization of the Western, whose breaking paradigms revolutionized not only the concepts related to the nature, but, mainly, to the role of the man in this scenario.Keywords: Epistemological Reorganization; Man; Natural World.

Fate of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Social

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

Personhood in a Neurobiological Age

Neuro ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolas Rose ◽  
Joelle M. Abi-Rached
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relation ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Deep Interior

This chapter explores the neurobiological self. It argues that the emerging neuroscientific understandings of selfhood are unlikely to efface modern human beings' understanding of themselves as persons equipped with a deep interior world of mental states that have a causal relation to their action. Rather, they are likely to add a neurobiological dimension to human beings' self-understanding and their practices of self-management. In this sense, the “somatic individuality” which was once the province of the psy- sciences, is spreading to the neuro- sciences. Yet psy is not being displaced by neuro: neurobiological conceptions of the self are being construed alongside psychological ones.

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