scholarly journals A Critical Interpretation of Black Humor in Charles Wright's the Messenger and the Wig

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 7328-7334
Keyword(s):  
General Condition ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
The World ◽  
Charles Wright ◽  
Black Humor ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Critical Interpretation

Charles Wright is one of the experimental American novelists of the mid-sixties and is concerned with depicting the absurdity of life in a world that threatens to destroy man’s sovereign self. As a black humourist, he not only highlights the black man’s despair in the white dominated America, but also the general condition of man in a hostile universe. He has placed his characters in the most bizarre setting to bring out man’s utter helplessness in the world. He tries to show how man becomes an easy victim of both the cosmic and social forces in the present day world. But despite his treatment of the bleak universe of human beings, Wright’s vision of life is not dominated by cynicism and despair. In this paper an attempt has been made to show how by incorporating into his fiction the vision of black humour Wright presents a constructive vision of life by not choosing an alternative to the meaningless and purposeless life, but by complementing it with a spirit of laughter which should help man in confronting life with courage and fortitude. His treatment of black man as a paradigm of the precarious human condition divorces him from other black novelists of the protest tradition. Whereas the writers of the protest tradition are occupied with the specific nature of black man’s problems, Wright is concerned with the idea that the black man, by his special burden in history, becomes the ultimate metaphor of the general human condition.

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 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

Cosmopolitanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Held ◽  
Pietro Maffettone
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
High Degree

Cosmopolitanism, in the broadest sense, is a way of thinking about the human condition. It portrays humanity as a universal fellowship. The unity to which cosmopolitans refer can be intellectual (we all share a capacity for reason), moral (we are all part of a single moral community), or institutional (we are all vulnerable to the same political evils and thus require shared collective solutions). The cosmopolitan intuition with its drive to highlight commonality is undoubtedly important. It understands that human beings are capable of an enormous range of good and bad, and attempts to embed human activity in a framework of common rules and norms; hence, it seeks to tame the potential for violent conflict. It tries to give us reasons to care for each other and to broaden our moral and intellectual universe beyond the remit of our personal ties and immediate environment. It offers a model of political action that confronts some of the most pressing challenges we face in the twenty-first century and does so by suggesting inclusive institutional solutions. Yet, cosmopolitanism would not be an attractive philosophical position if it did not consistently strive to address some of its underlying tensions. One of the most intensely shared elements of the human experience is particularity, not unity. We come to the world from families and social and cultural groups, and often develop our moral sensibilities within the framework of public discourses based on specific political traditions. Critics often contend that cosmopolitanism downplays such particularity and is thus unable to reflect one of the most important aspects of persons’ lives. A second encompassing objection leveled at cosmopolitanism is its high degree of utopianism. Cosmopolitanism, its critics contend, is a flight from political reality. Its plans for institutional reform are too abstract to be credible and neglect the importance of power in human political relationships. Cosmopolitans should accept these challenges. Their aim should be to make cosmopolitanism more attractive by explaining the place of special ties in their moral outlook, and to make it more credible by detailing the urgency of cosmopolitan political reform. The enduring success of a cosmopolitan ethos is thus partly reliant on cosmopolitans’ ability to provide convincing answers to these alleged weaknesses.

scholarly journals The times and spaces of leadership development: (un)designing learning

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (57) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Fatien Diochon ◽  
Robert Garvey ◽  
David Gray
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Development ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Central Point ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
The World ◽  
The Times

The above quotation taps into something within the human condition that is potentiallyat least, very powerful. We, human beings, have aspirations; flying might be just one ofthem! But the central point here is that “the majority of people” often comply or silencetheir aspirations. In some contexts around the world, silence and compliance could beseen as the “rational” choice. However, even within great oppressive regimes, the humanspirit may shine through, and empowerment can potentially emerge.Our complex and dangerous times set the context for both tragedy and hope. Against thisbackdrop, this special issue of Cuadernos de Administracion explores the ways in whichleadership spirit can develop. To be more specific, we delve into this tension betweentragedy and hope through the four following main themes:• The spaces for learning• Crossing boundaries for learning• Timing in learning• Power dynamics in learning spaces

The Individual and the Social

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Erikson
Keyword(s):  
Social Forces ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Scene ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Coping ◽  
Continuous Field

This chapter considers a second approach to the sociological perspective, which has to do with the effort to make clear that the social scene and the individual persons who compose it can be viewed as quite different entities. Sociologists know how to approach their subject matter as an assembly of parts. At the same time, they are cognizant of the fact that the social world, in essence, is a continuous field of force—a thing of drifts and tides and currents and flows. Human beings are all caught up in those drifts and flows, often without knowing that to be so. Autonomy is not a quality gained by asserting it to be so (“we believe in free will”). It is a quality to be gained by becoming aware of and coping with the social forces that make up the world in which we live.

BUREAUCRATIC LEARNING

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-358
Author(s):  
Robert Nisbet
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Maker ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Individual

Through the application of science, human beings in America and other parts of the world have been liberated from plagues, pestilences, threats of famine, hardship and torment that once seemed an unalterable part of the human condition. And until recently, all of this was rewarded by public and governmental respect. In the past few years, however, disenchantment has set in, with the public concluding that the post-war promises of learning were inflated and misleading. Much of science and scholarship has become obsessed with what it likes to think is a public-policy role, with the individual scholar only too happy to serve as policy maker. Unhappily, as the policy maker advances, the man of learning recedes. Bureaucratic learning has also become commercial. The large grant, the entrepreneurially established institute have come to wield great power. Thus a substantial amount of research that does not really require great amounts of money and complex organizations, that is indeed retarded in inspiration by them, demands them anyhow. Grantsmanship, at first a wry joke among academics, is by now a publicly recognized source of banality, trivialization and pretentiousness. Bureaucratic learning has lost its sense of proportion and of the true roots of knowledge.

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.

“Utopia First!” A Machiavellian Conception of Solidarity in More's Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93
Author(s):  
Marie-Claire Phélippeau
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Farm Work ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Difficulties ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
Communal Organization

This paper shows how solidarity is one of the founding principles in Thomas More's Utopia (1516). In the fictional republic of Utopia described in Book II, solidarity has a political and a moral function. The principle is at the center of the communal organization of Utopian society, exemplified in a number of practices such as the sharing of farm work, the management of surplus crops, or the democratic elections of the governor and the priests. Not only does solidarity benefit the individual Utopian, but it is a prerequisite to ensure the prosperity of the island of Utopia and its moral preeminence over its neighboring countries. However, a limit to this principle is drawn when the republic of Utopia faces specific social difficulties, and also deals with the rest of the world. In order for the principle of solidarity to function perfectly, it is necessary to apply it exclusively within the island or the republic would be at risk. War is not out of the question then, and compassion does not apply to all human beings. This conception of solidarity, summed up as “Utopia first!,” could be dubbed a Machiavellian strategy, devised to ensure the durability of the republic. We will show how some of the recommendations of Realpolitik made by Machiavelli in The Prince (1532) correspond to the Utopian policy enforced to protect their commonwealth.

Jalan Kesempurnaan Menurut Jamaah Insan Al-Kamil di Cijati Desa Cikareo Selatan Sumedang

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Syarifudin Syarifudin
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Sect ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

Each religious sect has its own characteristics, whether fundamental, radical, or religious. One of them is Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, which is in Cijati, South Cikareo Village, Wado District, Sumedang Regency. This congregation is Sufism with the concept of self-purification as the subject of its teachings. So, the purpose of this study is to reveal how the origin of Insan Al-Kamil Congregation, the concept of its purification, and the procedures of achieving its purification. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method with a normative theological approach as the blade of analysis. In addition, the data generated is the result of observation, interviews, and document studies. From the collected data, Jamaah Insan Al-Kamil adheres to the core teachings of Islam and is the tenth regeneration of Islam Teachings, which refers to the Prophet Muhammad SAW. According to this congregation, self-perfection becomes an obligation that must be achieved by human beings in order to remember Allah when life is done. The process of self-purification is done when human beings still live in the world by knowing His God. Therefore, the peak of self-purification is called Insan Kamil. 

Dreams Give Birth to Reality”. Engraving Austroseraphicum Coelum as an Attempt to Create a New Reality by the Spanish Habsburgs Dynastic Propaganda / Sny rodzą rzeczywistość…”. Grafika Austroseraphicum Coelum jako próba kreowania nowej rzeczywistości za pomocą propagandy dynastycznej Habsburgów hiszpańskich

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kurowiak
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
General Condition ◽  
Symbolic System ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Mission Of God ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Church

AbstractAs a work of propaganda, graphics Austroseraphicum Coelum Paulus Pontius should create a new reality, make appearances. The main impression while seeing the graphics is the admiration for the power of Habsburgs, which interacts with the power of the Mother of God. She, in turn, refers the viewer to God, as well as Franciscans placed on the graphic, they become a symbol of the Church. This is a starting point for further interpretation of the drawing. By the presence of certain characters, allegories, symbols, we can see references to a particular political situation in the Netherlands - the war with the northern provinces of Spain. The message of the graphic is: the Spanish Habsburgs, commissioned by the mission of God, they are able to fight all of the enemies, especially Protestants, with the help of Immaculate and the Franciscans. The main aim of the graphic is to convince the viewer that this will happen and to create in his mind a vision of the new reality. But Spain was in the seventeenth century nothing but a shadow of former itself (in the time of Philip IV the general condition of Spain get worse). That was the reason why they wanted to hold the belief that the empire continues unwavering. The form of this work (graphics), also allowed to export them around the world, and the ambiguity of the symbolic system, its contents relate to different contexts, and as a result, the Habsburgs, not only Spanish, they could promote their strength everywhere. Therefore it was used very well as a single work of propaganda, as well as a part of a broader campaign

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