scholarly journals The unbearable lightness of diff�rance: The ethos of deconstruction

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Milan Kundera ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Global Village ◽  
Environmental Challenges ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Famous Book

The unbearable lightness of diff�rance is in reference to Milan Kundera�s famous book, The unbearable lightness of being. Being is unbearably light, if interpreted as Heidegger did as either the meaning of Being or the truth of Being, yet in Derrida�s response to Heidegger he argues that diff�rance is �older� than the meaning of Being, even older than the truth of Being, and thus one could argue that diff�rance is even lighter than Being and thus even more unbearable. What possibilities does such an unbearable lightness of diff�rance offer to human being-with (Mitsein) in a global village faced with so many socio-economic and environmental challenges? The unbearable lightness could be absolute relativism and particularism as Rawls has interpreted it or it could be the unbearable lightness of auto-deconstruction. The unbearable lightness of diff�rance opens a socio-political space with an ethos of deconstruction and thereby response or ibility towards the other. This lightness of diff�rance can be interpreted as a difficult liberty (difficult liberty as Levinas interprets it) or even an unbearable liberty of infinite broken chains of signifiers and yet a freedom that is held to account (that responds) to the other. This liberty is an infinite responsibility towards the other and therefore infinite responsibility towards justice (dik�). Diff�rance is liberty as all there is, is text, but this liberty is not licentiousness of absolute disconnection, but the difficult liberty of being only responsible towards the other. The question this article will grapple with is: what ethical implications can be gathered from this state of being-with, this unbearable lightness of diff�rance in the global village?Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Philosophy and philosophy of religion. The article focusses on the conversation between Heidegger and Derrida, with regards to diff�rance and Austrag.

The Hierophanic Facets of the Seraphic Hymns

Trictrac ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petru Adrian Danciu
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Material World ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The People ◽  
Musical History ◽  
The Face ◽  
The One

Starting from the cry of the seraphim in Isaiahʹ s prophecy, this article aims to follow the rhythm of the sacred harmony, transcending the symbols of the angelic world and of the divine names, to get to the face to face meeting between man and God, just as the seraphim, reflecting their existence, stand face to face. The finality of the sacred harmony is that, during the search for God inside the human being, He reveals Himself, which is the reason for the affirmation of “I Am that I Am.” Through its hypnotic cyclicality, the profane temporality has its own musicality. Its purpose is to incubate the unsuspected potencies of the beings “caught” in the material world. Due to the fact that it belongs to the aeonic time, the divine music will exceed in harmony the mechanical musicality of profane time, dilating and temporarily cancelling it. Isaiah is witness to such revelation offering access to the heavenly concert. He is witness to divine harmonies produced by two divine singers, whose musical history is presented in our article. The seraphim accompanied the chosen people after their exodus from Egypt. The cultic use of the trumpet is related to the characteristics and behaviour of the seraphim. The seraphic music does not belong to the Creator, but its lyrics speak about the presence of the Creator in two realities, a spiritual and a material one. Only the transcendence of the divine names that are sung/cried affirms a unique reality: God. The chant-cry is a divine invocation with a double aim. On the one hand, the angels and the people affirm God’s presence and call His name and, on the other, the Creator affirms His presence through the angels or in man, the one who is His image and His likeness. The divine music does not only create, it is also a means of communion, implementing the relation of man to God and, thus, God’s connection with man. It is a relation in which both filiation and paternity disappear inside the harmony of the mutual recognition produced by music, a reality much older than Adam’s language.

La ética del Otro: una introducción al pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Carlos Alvaréz Teijeiro
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
First Philosophy

Emmanuel Lévinas, the philosopher of ethics par excellence in the twentieth century, and by own merit one of the most important ethical philosophers in the history of western philosophy, is also the philosopher of the Other. Thereby, it can be said that no thought has deepened like his in the ups and downs of the ethical relationship between subject and otherness. The general objective of this work is to expose in a simple and understandable way some ideas that tend to be quite dark in the philosophical work of the author, since his profuse religious production will not be analyzed here. It is expected to show that his ideas about the being and the Other are relevant to better understand interpersonal relationships in times of 4.0 (re)evolution. As specific objectives, this work aims to expose in chronological order the main works of the thinker, with special emphasis on his ethical implications: Of the evasion (1935), The time and the Other (1947), From the existence to the existent (1947), Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (1961) and, last, Otherwise than being, or beyond essence (1974). In the judgment of Lévinas, history of western philosophy starting with Greece, has shown an unusual concern for the Being, this is, it has basically been an ontology and, accordingly, it has relegated ethics to a second or third plane. On the other hand and in a clear going against the tide movement, our author supports that ethics should be considered the first philosophy and more, even previous to the proper philosophize. This novel approach implies, as it is supposed, that the essential question of the philosophy slows down its origin around the Being in order to inquire about the Other: it is a philosophy in first person. Such a radical change of perspective generates an underlying change in how we conceive interpersonal relationships, the complex framework of meanings around the relationship Me and You, which also philosopher Martin Buber had already spoken of. As Lévinas postulates that ethics is the first philosophy, this involves that the Other claims all our attention, intellectual and emotional, to the point of considering that the relationship with the Other is one of the measures of our identity. Thus, “natural” attitude –husserlian word not used by Lévinas- would be to be in permanent disposition regarding to the meeting with the Other, to be in permanent opening state to let ourselves be questioned by him. Ontology, as the author says, being worried about the Being, has been likewise concerned about the Existence, when the matter is to concern about the particular Existent that every otherness supposes for us. In conclusion it can be affirmed that levinasian ethics of the meeting with the Other, particular Face, irreducible to the assumption, can contribute with an innovative looking to (re)evolving the interpersonal relationships in a 4.0 context.

A Liberdade e a Justiça: horizontes para uma racionalidade socioambiental

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Sepúlveda Ferriz
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Great Opportunity ◽  
The World ◽  
Authentic Development ◽  
Sense Of Justice

Freedom and Justice have always been challenged. Since the most remote times, and in the most varied circumstances of places and people, human beings have tried to clarify and put into practice these two controversial concepts. Freedom and Justice, in effect, are words, but also dreams, desires and practices that, not being imperfect, are less sublime and ambitious. Reflecting on them on the basis of an ethics of development and socioenvironmental sustainability is still a great challenge in our contemporaneity. This book is born from the need that we all have to reflect, understand what our role is in relation to the OTHER, understood as the other as Environment. Doing this from such disparate areas and at the same time as current as Economics, Philosophy and Ecology, is still a great opportunity to discuss complexity, transdisciplinarity and the inclusion of diverse themes, but which all converge in the Human Being and its relationship with the world. Endowing human beings with Freedom and a sense of Justice means RESPONSIBILITY. To be free and to want a better and fairer world is to endow our existence with meaning and meaning. Agency, autonomy, functioning, dignity, rights, are capacities that must be leveraged individually and collectively for authentic development to exist. Development as Freedom is a valid proposal for thinking about a socio-environmental rationality that interferes in the controversial relations between economics, ethics and the environment.

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

THE KILLER OF NATURE – ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-295
Author(s):  
Ekta Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Public ◽  
Summary Paper ◽  
Living Being

The Presented summary paper target is to draw the attention of the public to the benefits of Environment and how we are connected to the Environment. To show that if there’s any change in the Environmental conditions, then how the conditions change in human beings lives. Living Being, whether a Human Being or Animals or plants,  are all directly or indirectly Dependent on the Environment for their Survival. When asked truly it can be said that none of the living being can survive without the presence of Environment. It is difficult to find absolutely natural environments, and it is common that the naturalness varies in a continuum, from ideally 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform.

Individualisation as a social-cultural process and morality

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Janusz Mariański
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Relativism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Cultural Process ◽  
Self Development ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
Individual Human

In this article, the issue of structural individualisation, which is one of the results of social modernisation, is adopted as the subject-matter. In the processes of individualisation, it is, first and foremost, the importance of an individual human being and matters relevant to their life, including the obligation to make constant choices in all the aspects of life, that is placed emphasis upon. In the aspect of values, the process of individualisation means transfer from values seen as responsibilities (related to duties) to values connected with self-fulfilment (self-development). The consequence of individualisation is the significant changes in the realm of morality: departing from traditional moral values and standards, permissivism and moral relativism, the destruction of normativity, and the secularisation of morality. On the other hand, it creates the opportunity to determine one's own moral choices and shapean autonomous moral personality.

Hegel’s Account of Christianity and Religious Alienation

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Insight Into

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel argues that the development of the religions of the world leads up to and culminates in Christianity, which is the one true religion. One key element which separates Christianity from the other religions, according to Hegel, concerns the issue of alienation. He argues that the previous religions all contain some form of alienation, which can be found in their conceptions of the divine. In this paper, I wish to examine Hegel’s view that Christianity alone overcomes religious alienation. What is it that makes Christianity so special in this regard? This is a particularly important issue given that the question of alienation is so central in the post-Hegelian thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx, who all insist that, far from overcoming alienation, Christianity is guilty of causing it. I wish to argue that this issue provides new insight into the old criticism of Hegel as a thinker of abstraction.

The confrontation between essence and existence in Plato and Aristotle’s ideas in art

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (SE) ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
Ramin Keshavarz ◽  
Moheb Ali Absalan
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Art Philosophy ◽  
Theory Of Forms

Plato by proposing the "theory of forms" changed the essence of truth and he converted it from sensorial case to extrasensory. As a result, he disparaged art and beauty that they were depended with world of phenomena and senses. He considered idea’s position in the sphere of institute and episteme and placed sensorial case, "Doxa" and "Eikon" as base of art that from his point of view is not world of "to be" and "not to be", but its world of representation and as a result he interpreted art world and it’s product as a false phenomena. He claimed that art relates with revealed component of ego that causes irreparable ruin for human being and has relationship with "Episteme". In the other hand, Aristotle unlike Plato believed in art and existence originality and considered art as a result of human’s episteme and rationality. He introduced adequacy, cognition natural talent as three principle of art. He claimed art and science deal with episteme and knowledge and they are common at the end. But what is Plato and Aristotle disagreement in sphere of art and from where it originates? And which cases are not similar in the sphere of art? The following essay will explain Plato and Aristotle’s art philosophy and comparing and explaining their ideas with relating existence originality and essence originality.  

Telling refugees’ stories: Testimony and hospitality in graphic novel L’Odyssée d’Hakim by Fabien Toulmé

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-313
Author(s):  
Jennifer Boum Make
Keyword(s):  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
The Other ◽  
Graphic Novel ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Testing Zone ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

Following the increase in migratory flows since 2015, in the Euro-Mediterranean region, bandes dessinées are mobilized to stir up compassion and prompt engagement with marginalized biographies. It begins with the premise that aesthetic approaches of bandes dessinées reveal a testing zone to juxtapose modalities of representation and expression of refugees and ways to interact with otherness. To interrogate the relationship between aesthetic devices and the formation of solidarity, this article considers the first volume of Fabien Toulmé’s trilogy, L’Odyssée d’Hakim: De la Syrie à la Turquie (2018). How does Toulmé’s use of aesthetic devices make space for the other, in acts of dialogue and exchange? What are the ethical implications for the exercise of bearing witness to migrant and refugee narratives, especially in the transcription and translation in words and drawing of their biographies? This article argues that visual narratives can provide for the creation of a hospitable testimonial space for migrants and refugees’ voices. The article outlines the aesthetic methodology deployed in graphic storytelling, reflects on what it means for the perception of refugees, and questions the use and ethical appeal of visual narratives as a form to curate hospitality.

scholarly journals Non-philosophical Christ-poetics beyond the mystical turn in conversation with continental philosophy of religion

2016 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Mystical Theology ◽  
Critical Conversation ◽  
Language Text ◽  
The Way

The religious turn in continental philosophy has opened the door for postmetaphysical mystical theology. Postmetaphysical mystical theology seeks to understand the non-relation relation of language (text) to the Other. Yet, this non-relation relation to the Other, who is every other, can also be interpreted differently to the mystical understanding. For example, Žižek argues that the Other, which is often experienced as the uncanny, the unpredictable and the contingent (lived spirituality), is not necessarily the result of some mystical unknowable Otherness but is a consequence of the way the subject’s own activity is inscribed into reality. These experiences of lived spirituality or experiences of Otherness can, rather than being interpreted as an in-breaking of the mystical Other, be interpreted otherwise, as a grammatological consequence of the inability and impossibility of language (Lacan). Therefore, in this article, Žižek’s thoughts function as a bridge to bring this mystical turn back into critical conversation with continental philosophy and particularly with the thoughts of Derrida, Laruelle and Stiegler. The contemporary mystical turn in theology rediscovers something of this non-religious religion. Derrida’s thoughts are in close proximity to negative theology and yet there is an important difference. This difference will be explored and further developed towards Laruelle’s non-philosophy, which does not translate into a non-religion religion or postmetaphysical metaphysics but remains a non-philosophy or maybe a science of Christ. This article will conclude with a tentative exploration of a postmetaphysical Christ-poetics beyond the mystical turn.

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