scholarly journals The Vulnerable (Post) Modern Self and the “Greening” of Spiritual Personhood through Life in the Spirit

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 194
Author(s):  
Mary Frohlich
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Social Esteem ◽  
Life On Earth

In the period now being called the Anthropocene, the fatal vulnerabilities of the modern way of constructing selfhood are becoming ever more evident. Joanna Macy, who writes from a Buddhist perspective, has argued for the need to “green” the self by rediscovering its participation in ecological and cosmic networks. From a Christian perspective, I would articulate this in terms of an imperative to rediscover our spiritual personhood as radical communion in both God and cosmos. In this paper, “self” refers to an ever-restless process of construction of identity based in self-awareness and aimed at maintaining one’s integrity, coherence, and social esteem. I use the term “person,” on the other hand, to refer to a relational center that exists to be in communion with other persons. How—within the conditions of the dawning Anthropocene—can the tension between these two essential aspects of human existence be opened up in a way that can more effectively protect human and other life on Earth? This would require, it seems, harnessing both the self-protective and the self-giving potentials of human beings. The proposed path is to give ourselves over into the rhythms of the Spirit, being breathed in to selfless personal communion and out to co-creation of our refreshed selfhood.

“The Continuity of Married Companionship”

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethical Action ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
A Site ◽  
Focus Questions

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.

The oughtness of existence: Living and suffering by what we ought

2021 ◽  
pp. 095935432110369
Author(s):  
Joachim Meier
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings

Rooted in the fact–value dichotomy of the modern scientific outlook, psychology tends to render “ought” as distinguishable from and additional to “is.” The purpose of this article, however, is to disclose an “oughtness” at the center of human existence by which human beings inevitably live and suffer. In the first part, psychology’s neglect of oughtness is tracked down through significant albeit different theoretical strands. Second, through a threefold argument entailing (a) the other, (b) language, and (c) the self, it is revealed how people’s concrete lived lives as well as the very formation of a subject are incomprehensible without the oughtness of existence. Finally, the relation between suffering and oughtness is spelled out. Due to the oughtness of existence, guilt and inadequacy enter into the human life.

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 Zwierzę w filozofii moralności

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-268
Author(s):  
Wiesław Dyk
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ecological Ethics ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
The One

The discussion about the rights of animals is always up-to-date. The dichotomy division into philoanimalists and philohominists, although reasonable, is not satisfactory to everyone. It is too strongly associated with the division into people and things in Roman law. To avoid this association in the context of biocentric trends in ecological ethics, accomplishments of evolutionary psychology and the concept of animal welfare, it is suggested that a third moral dimension dealing with creatures with highly developed nervous system be introduced between moral objectivity of creatures with high perception and moral subjectivity of people - creatures characterized by self-awareness and reflexive awareness. Human beings on the one hand are responsible for recognizing their rights given by nature and on the other hand, they are obliged to create a law to protect themselves.

A closer look into alterity: eccentricity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Subjectivity

This chapter argues that at the heart of alterity lies a double paradox. First, alterity speaks of eccentricity, of the non-coincidence of the Self with itself. Most of the philosophical anthropologies of the last hundred years emphasize that the phenomenon of eccentricity is indigenous to human existence, and characterize Man as an eccentric being. Fundamental to the understanding of human subjectivity is clarifying the ways self-awareness is structured as an experience inextricably entangled with an experience of a basic otherness. To be a human being is to be in juxtaposition with, and sometimes to feel in opposition to, a set of given involuntary dispositions in front of which we need to voluntarily take a position.

Plato's Critique of Hedonism in the Philebus

2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT C. BARTLETT
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Self Knowledge

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.

Existential Philosophy and Psychotherapy Ethics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Noyon ◽  
Thomas Heidenreich
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Principles ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Existential Philosophy ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Authentic Life

This chapter introduces five central concepts of existential philosophy in order to deduce ethical principles for psychotherapy: phenomenology, authenticity, paradoxes, isolation, and freedom vs. destiny. Phenomenological perspectives are useful as a guideline for how to encounter and understand patients in terms of individuality and uniqueness. Existential communication as a means to search and face the truth of one’s existence is considered as a valid basis for an authentic life. Paradoxes that cannot be solved are characteristic for human existence and should be dealt with to turn resignation into active choices. Isolation is one of the “existentials” characterizing human life between two paradox poles: On the one hand we are deeply in need of relationships to other human beings; on the other hand we are thrown into the world alone and will always stay like this, no matter how close we get to another person. Further, addressing freedom and destiny as two extremes of one dimension can serve as a basis for orientation in life and also for dealing with the separation between responsibility and guilt.

The Rosamond Plots

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca N. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Beautiful Woman ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Radical Revision

Abstract In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) an earnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman named Rosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision of the version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre. Via its invocation of Jane Eyre’s Rosamond plot, Middlemarch challenges the very nature of self-knowledge, questions the status of identification in intersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknowability of the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted in Jane Eyre is not only insufficient, but also verges on self-absorption and even solipsism. One way in which Eliot enacts this revision is by shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away from models of identification. The change marks an evolution in our understanding of the way in which character and communal life is conceived by each author. More specifically, Eliot’s revisions situate empathic response as being dependent upon the recognition of the radical alterity of the other.

scholarly journals Liturgia: lugar da teologia – A relevância de um antigo princípio

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (261) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Sinivaldo Silva Tavares
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
De Se ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of

Esta reflexão quer resgatar a antiga intuição eclesial expressa no princípio: legem credendi statuat lex supplicandi (“a lei da oração estabeleça a lei da fé”). Assim sendo, a norma do culto cristão determinará a lógica do crer, explicitando que entre a Liturgia e a Teologia vige uma relação de intrínseca reciprocidade. De um lado, concebe-se a Liturgia como fonte da Teologia e, do outro, a Teologia surge como a instância de verificação da Liturgia. As interpelações que a Liturgia lança à Teologia se reúnem em torno de três elementos: a eclesialidade como o húmus da teologia; o evento pascal de Cristo como a seiva da teologia; a criação, a história e o ser humano como o espaço vital da teologia. A conclusão frisa a necessidade de se aceitar a sacramentalidade da existência humana e a contingência de suas manifestações, e sugere que tanto a Liturgia como a Teologia se tornem mais simbólicas e se aproximem mais da poesia.Abstract: This reflection intends to retrieve and preserve the old ecclesiastical intuition expressed in the principle: legem credendi statuat lex supplicandi (“the law of the prayer should establish the law of faith”). Thus, the norm of the Christian cult will determine the logic of the belief, making it clear that between Liturgy and Theology there prevails a relationship of intrinsic reciprocity. On the one hand, Liturgy is conceived as the source of Theology and, on the other, Theology appears as the instance that confirms Liturgy. The challenges Liturgy places before Theology centre around three elements: the ecclesiastical principles as the humus of theology; the paschal event of Christ as the sap of Theology; and the creation, history and human beings as the vital space of Theology. The conclusion emphasizes the need to accept the sacramental character of human existence and the contingency of its manifestations and suggests that both Liturgy and Theology should become more symbolic and closer to poetry.

Self within World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Culliney ◽  
David Jones
Keyword(s):  
Personal Development ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Dynamic Flow ◽  
The West ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Constructive Interaction

We describe the foundations of the fractal self in relation to the Chinese notion of personal development and enhancement of adeptness in the world and mutualism with the other. This seeking, described in the codified system of Daoism, is a pathway that may progress to the highest level of achievement of such a self: that which defines a sage. The chapter introduces the view that a sage is a fractal self that achieves a peak of intimacy and constructive interaction with the world. We detail the development of human beings on this pathway, emerging beyond the core embodiments of empathy, sympathy, and rudimentary morality observed in apes. The self for the early Chinese was always a being that was embedded in the world and dynamic flow of forces. This self was defined in intimate terms as adaptable and adept, seeking to be a microcosmic contributor to some holistic macrocosm. In this chapter, Daoism leads our thinking on how the fractal self engages with the world. In turn, this way of understanding selfness and its potential to enrich its system from within resonates with discussions of the interactive self of Buddhism and was also in the minds of Pre-Socratic thinkers in the West.

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