A Polanyian Rescue of The Abolition of Man

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Jon Fennell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Objective Value ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
Good And Evil

The Abolition of Man, though short in length and casual in tone, is among the most important books of the twentieth century. The reason it possesses such significance is that it reveals through penetrating analysis the contemporary sceptical assault on the very possibility of rational morality and, indeed, on the very meaning of human life. In meeting and overcoming this assault, Lewis embraces the concept of objective value. But this concept is itself under attack in modernity, most notably in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. There is, however, an effective response to this withering onslaught. It is found in Michael Polanyi's ‘fiduciary’ philosophy. This study shows how Polanyi's account of justification inoculates Lewis' objective value against Nietzsche's virulent attack, thereby preserving the defence of meaning and morality that constitutes the essential contribution of The Abolition of Man.

Ważyk metafizyczny? / Ważyk – A Metaphysician?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Sufficiency

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.

scholarly journals The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity †

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 597
Author(s):  
Yuxiao Su
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
First Century ◽  
Parallel Study ◽  
The Status ◽  
Implicit Belief ◽  
Objective Value ◽  
Medieval Model ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Spiritual Resource

This paper considers C.S. Lewis’ “doctrine of objective value” in two of his major works, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. Lewis uses the Chinese name Tao, albeit with an incomplete understanding of its origins, for the objective worldview. The paper argues that Tao, as an explicit theme of The Abolition of Man, is also a determining undercurrent in The Discarded Image. In the former work, Tao is what Lewis wants to defend and restore against twentieth-century secular ideologies, which Lewis condemns as infected with “the poison of subjectivism”. In the latter work, where Lewis presents one of the best accounts of the European medieval model of the Universe, objective value (the Tao in Lewis’ argument) underlies both how the model has been shaped, and how Lewis, as a medievalist, accounts for and draws upon it as an intellectual and spiritual resource. The purpose of this parallel study is to show that Lewis’ explication of the Tao in The Abolition of Man, which is a “built-in”, implicit belief in The Discarded Image, provides a critique of tendencies towards the subjectivism prevalent in Lewis’ lifetime. These tendencies can be traced into the moral relativism, pluralism and reductionism of the twenty-first century, giving Lewis’ work the status of twentieth-century prophecy.

scholarly journals Experience teaching Christian ethics in a secular school

2005 ◽  
pp. 305-312
Author(s):  
T. Sannikova
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Spiritual Education ◽  
Experience Teaching ◽  
Moral Crisis ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Ideal

The spiritual and moral crisis in society, which is a sign of the loss of clear ideas about good and evil, when the ideal of a person becomes "successful in human life" and no matter how successful it becomes, when moral laws and human life are worthless, needs urgent return to spiritual sources. As one of the means of spiritual education of adolescents, a Christian ethics elective was introduced at the secondary school №26 in Odessa.

scholarly journals The Peculiarities of Iris Murdoch’s artistic method (based on her novel “The Black Prince”)

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 90-94
Author(s):  
N. Telegina ◽  
T. Butsyak
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Complex Investigation ◽  
Philosophical Aspect ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Good And Evil

For the purpose of defining Iris Murdoch’s artistic method a complex investigation of the problems and style of her famous novel “The Black Prince” was made. Special attention was given to the philosophical problems of Good and Evil, Contingency and Necessity in human life, absurdity, choice, aloofness, to the philosophical aspect of the novel, which is revealed with the help of the flash-back technique. The problems raised in the novel, its sensitive main character absorbed in psychoanalysis and looking for the sense of existence, naturalistic details & the postscripts, revealing different subjective points of view on the same events, prove that the novel should be regarded as existentialist

scholarly journals Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Myers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

The domestication of the earth

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Solar Energy ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Ecological Theory ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
The Holocene ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The domestication of the earth entails the enfolding of ‘nature’ into human life and society. This chapter focuses on the millennia of the Holocene, when human societies consisted of food collectors and agriculturalists who essentially lived off recently fixed solar energy. In the course of its last 100 years, geography has from time to time taken in, and focused its attention on, diverse approaches to its subject matter. But as a ground bass to these variations, the relation between humans and the environment has persisted, though sometimes virtually at sotto voce level. In part, geography's attention has concentrated on landscapes as visible demonstrations, past and present, of these interrelations, but it has also taken an approach based explicitly on late-twentieth-century ecological theory. This chapter examines humans as hunter-gatherers during prehistoric times, along with the emergence of agriculture in Britain.

Communities of Practice from a Phenomenological Stance

2012 ◽  
pp. 57-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio De Michelis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Information Systems ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Utility Value ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Relevant Concept ◽  
The Social ◽  
Famous Book

Community (Gemeinschaft in German) has emerged as a relevant concept for understanding the social dimension of human life, at the end of nineteenth century, when in a famous book by Ferdinand Toennies (1925), it was opposed to society (Gesellschaft in German). The debate that accompanied and followed Toennies’ book at the beginning of the twentieth century opposed the irrationality of communities (where no utility value justifies membership) to the rational principle sustaining societies (that are ruled in order to balance costs and benefits of all members). More recently, the concept of community has been again at the center of philosophical debate after its deconstruction by Jean Luc Nancy: it is, therefore, interesting to situate the concept of community of practice within it. What emerges from this analysis offers to designers of ICT-based applications, such as information systems, knowledge management systems, etc., some new hints on the nature of those systems.

Introduction

Forms of Life ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-74
Author(s):  
Andreas Gailus
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Dynamic Process ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Temporal Specificity ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The introduction situates the book within the context of contemporary debates about life, spells out the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later thought to the argument, and explains how literature provides access to the political interiority of human life unavailable to contemporary theories of biopolitics. It also motivates the geographical and temporal specificity of the book, arguing that German culture from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century developed an expanded conception of life as the dynamic drive toward form. It suggests that this dynamic process of formation was seen by many in the German tradition as fundamental not merely to metabolic and bodily life, but equally to the vital processes of aesthetic, psychic, and socio-political phenomena.

6. Religion

2016 ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Contemporary Philosopher ◽  
Good And Evil

Goethe was brought up in Frankfurt, a Protestant city where the Lutheran Church held sway, but was also introduced to key Enlightenment texts through his father’s extensive library. ‘Religion’ explains that an early Pietist phase strengthened the value that Goethe placed on tolerance in religious matters. Goethe’s standpoint was what the 18th century called ‘natural religion’. Goethe’s allegiance to the Enlightenment is seen in his work, including the poem ‘Prometheus’ (1774) and the neoclassical drama Iphigenie in Tauris (1786–7). Goethe seems to anticipate Nietzsche in viewing human life as ‘beyond good and evil’. What mattered to Goethe was individuality, which brings him close to the greatest contemporary philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

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