On the Harm of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Community Or ◽  
The World ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Individual Human ◽  
The Human Condition

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.

scholarly journals La condición humana y el Estado en Hobbes

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Héctor Sierra Salas
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Natural Condition ◽  
State Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Human Condition

Sobre la condición humana en la teoría del Estado de Hobbes. La necesidad de comprender la condición humana como razón de ser del Estado, se hace evidente a los largo de la obra política de Hobbes. Por eso, cabe notar cómo, paralelamente en los libros Elementos del Derecho Natural y Político, De Civey el Leviatán, el pensador inglés dedica parte de su estudio a la explicación de la naturaleza humana, y a la dramática condición de los hombres que habitan en medio de una situación de guerra permanente, surgida a partir del dominiode las pasiones naturales sobre el comportamiento humano. Así mismo, hace ver que la legitimación del Estado Civil y la justificación de elementos como el Derecho, la Ley, la soberanía, entre otros, surge de la necesidad de garantizarla paz y la seguridad a los hombres, lo cual significa sacarlos de su estado natural.Palabras clave: Hobbes, estado de naturaleza, Estado Civil.AbstractThe Human Condition in Hobbes’ State Theory. The need to understand the human condition as reason of being of the State becomes evident throughout Hobbes’s political work. For this reason, it is important to note how in the books, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, On the Citizen, and TheLeviathan, the English thinker dedicates part of his study to the explanation of human nature and to the dramatic condition of men who live in an environment of permanent war. This environment arises from the domain of natural passions that make up human behavior. Likewise, it is shown that the legitimacy of the Civil State and the justification of elements, such as rights, Law and sovereignty among others, arise from the need to guarantee peace and safety for humanbeings, which means removing them from their natural state.Key words: Hobbes, natural condition, Civil State.

Leonard Woolf’s Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo: Satirical Heritage as Apocalyptic Prophecy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vara Neverow
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Closing Time ◽  
Genetic Elements ◽  
Zoo Animals ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Animal Farm ◽  
The Human Condition

Leonard Woolf, in his 24-page satirical pamphlet, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo, was published in 1925 and was the seventh work in the first series of Hogarth Essays. In the work, Woolf explores the inherent attributes of the human condition from a highly ironic viewpoint, presenting his argument through the discourse of animals. Victoria Glendinning (Leonard Woolf: A Biography) categorizes the work as a “satirical squib” and describes how “the supercivilized zoo animals hold a debate after closing time to discuss Man.” The elephant, all too familiar with human nature, states emphatically that, “Human beings delude themselves that a League of Nations or Protection or armies and navies are going to give them security and civilization in their jungle.” Glendinning not only aligns the heritage of Woolf’s essay with the caustic social critiques of Swift and Kipling but also observes that Fear and Politics “casts a beam ahead toward Orwell’s Animal Farm” (Glendinning 240-41). By situating the essay in the context of its hereditary, genetic elements, Glendinning highlights how Woolf’s work is also passed on to another heir.

scholarly journals The Joy of Being as Anthropological Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Agapov Oleg D. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Human Condition

The joy of being is connected with one’s activities aimed at responding to the challenges of the elemental forces and the boundlessness of being, which are independent of human subjectivity. In the context of rising to the challenges of being, one settles to acquire a certain power of being in themselves and in the world. Thus, the joy of being is tied to achieving the level of the “miraculous fecundity” (E. Levinas), “an internal necessity of one’s life” (F. Vasilyuk), magnanimity (M. Mamardashvili). The ontological duty of any human being is to succeed at being human. The joy of being is closely connected to experiencing one’s involvement in the endless/eternity and realizing one’s subjective temporality/finitude, which attunes him to the absolute seriousness in relation to one’s complete realization in life. Joy is a foundational anthropological phenomenon in the structure of ways of experiencing the human condition. The joy of being as an anthropological practice can appear as a constantly expanding sphere of human subjectivity where the transfiguration of the powers of being occurs under the sign of the Height (Levinas) / the Good. Without the possibility of transfiguration human beings get tired of living, immerse themselves in the dejected state of laziness and the hopelessness of vanity. The joy of being is connected to unity, gathering the multiplicity of human life under the aegis of meaning that allows us to see the other and the alien in heteronomous being, and understand the nature of co-participation and responsibility before the forces of being, and also act in synergy with them.The joy of being stands before a human being as the joy of fatherhood/ motherhood, the joy of being a witness to the world in creative acts (the subject as a means to retreat before the world and let the world shine), the joy of every day that was saved from absurdity, darkness and the impersonal existence of the total. Keywords: joy, higher reality, anthropological practices, “the height”, subject, transcendence, practice of coping

The Primordial Affirmations of Literature

Janus Head ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Arthur A. Brown ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat”—a tale “intended to be after the fact”—affirms Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion that “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” The story dramatizes and reflects on the men’s situation in the world, their inter-subjective experience against the background of non-human nature. In facing the imminent possibility of their own deaths as, for each of them, “the final phenomenon of nature,” the men become “interpreters” of what is primary in the human condition. The line between the world of the reader and the world of the story, like the line between consciousness and being, is less a line than a horizon.

scholarly journals “os dentes afiados da vida preferem a carne na mais tenra infância ”: etnocartografar com olhos de besta

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (36) ◽  
pp. 01-28
Author(s):  
Marcos Ribeiro de Melo ◽  
Michele De freitas faria de Vasconcelos ◽  
Edson Augusto de Souza neto
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Ways Of Life ◽  
The Human Condition

in this article, we experience the exercise of a screen ethnocartography in agency with the film Beasts of the southern wild (2012) by the director Benh Zeitlin. We tested a film experimentation that led to a renewed writing (our) ways of life. We bet on cinema and childhood as possibilities for creating cracks and a stutter of language for the creation of new worlds and ways of living. In cinema images less as a representation, and more as art that proposes incompleteness, fissure, a hole in appearances. In childhood as an exercise of differentiation and resistance to dominant narratives in a given context. In childhood as a limiting experience of/in language, tirelessly exposing the human condition in front of the world. Thus, accompanying the main character of the plot, little Hushpuppy — a six-year-old resident of the “Charles Doucet Island”, experienced as “the Bathtub” —, we are shaken by the forms of life there, considered bestial and not recognized by city humans. Hushpuppy, his father and friends resist attempts to destroy their existence by the forms of the state that try to domesticate them, imbued with the logic that primitives must come to civilization, just as children must become adults. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology By Daniel J. Mahoney. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 200p. $65.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-617
Author(s):  
Peter Augustine Lawler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
The World ◽  
Abundant Evidence ◽  
Good And Evil

This very remarkable and most timely book differs from others on Solzhenitsyn by highlighting his “critique of ideology” and his “recovery of the ‘natural world’” (p. 3). Ideology, for Solzhenitsyn, is the name for the lie characteristic of the twentieth century: Human beings, through historical transformation, can end suffering and so make virtue or the distinction between good and evil superfluous. The state and God can wither away because we will no longer be political and spiritual beings. We know that ideology could not change human nature or what Daniel Mahoney calls “the ontological structure of the world,” but it could magnify human evil to genuinely monstrous dimensions. Solzhenitsyn's contention that communist ideology was responsible for the murder of tens of millions has become much less controversial in recent years. The Black Book of Communism, Mahoney shows, provides abundant evidence for what Solzhenitsyn already knew.

Agency, Identity and Technology

Janus Head ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
John Pauley ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Practice ◽  
The Human Condition

America has become a spiritual wasteland. Three aspects of the human condition are crucial for human beings to recognize if they are to develop a proper identity and agency within the world: these aspects are finitude, contingency, and the spiritual (which follows from the other two). The notion of the spiritual can be filled out with an understanding of faith. American culture is antithetical to faith, as is demonstrated through a discussion of the basic human practice of conversation. In America, conversation works against faith because conversation has become brutal. Contemporary debate literally works against faith because conversation has become brutal Contemporary debate literally works to annihilate the reality of others. These reflections support the conclusion that brutality is the antithesis of faithfulness.

Los avatares del logos

2001 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán
Keyword(s):  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.

With and Beyond Epistemologies from the South: Ontological Epistemology of Participation, Multi-topial Hermeneutics and the Calling of Planetary Realisations

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802292110146
Author(s):  
Ananta Kumar Giri
Keyword(s):  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The South ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Multiple Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
Universe Of Discourse ◽  
The Human Condition

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.

The September Program: Reflections on the Evidence

1978 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne C. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Diary Entry ◽  
Indirect Control ◽  
The Press ◽  
Political Warfare ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
War Aims ◽  
Individual Human

In August 1914 Kurt Riezler accompanied Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the Supreme Headquarters in Koblenz and Luxembourg. His duties were not clearly defined and included a variety of things: He worked on war aims, parliamentary speeches, revolutionary movements, and domestic political questions. He helped interpret the chancellor's policies to the press, establish guidelines for censorship, and write anonymous articles supporting Bethmann Hollweg's policies. He could be called Bethmann Hollweg's assistant for political warfare.Unlike most Germans Riezler sensed from the beginning that a German victory was not assured. On August 14, 1914, in his first diary entry after the outbreak of war, he noted that although “everybody was apparently happy to be able for once to dedicate himself unreservedly to a great cause, … no one doubts or appears to consider even for an instant what a gamble war is, especially this war.” Riezler also realized that the “ideas of 1914” would not retain their strength forever. “Just as the storm frightens the vermin out of the air—when it becomes quieter again, everything crawls out of its refuge—and emerges again in the state as well as in individual human beings.” This realization protected Riezler from the naive belief that Germany could bear a long war without an obvious effort to achieve a negotiated peace, without a new European order which at most allowed Germany indirect control, and without domestic political concessions to the German masses.

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