Self, Indian theories of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.S. Rukmani
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Spiritual Energy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Ultimate Principle ◽  
Ultimate Nature

Hindu thought traces its different conceptions of the self to the earliest extant Vedic sources composed in the Sanskrit language. The words commonly used in Hindu thought and religion for the self are jīva (life), ātman (breath), jīvātman (life-breath), puruṣa (the essence that lies in the body), and kṣetrajña (one who knows the body). Each of these words was the culmination of a process of inquiry with the purpose of discovering the ultimate nature of the self. By the end of the ancient period, the personal self was regarded as something eternal which becomes connected to a body in order to exhaust the good and bad karma it has accumulated in its many lives. This self was supposed to be able to regain its purity by following different spiritual paths by means of which it can escape from the circle of births and deaths forever. There is one more important development in the ancient and classical period. The conception of Brahman as both immanent and transcendent led to Brahman being identified with the personal self. The habit of thought that tried to relate every aspect of the individual with its counterpart in the universe (Ṛg Veda X. 16) had already prepared the background for this identification process. When the ultimate principle in the subjective and objective spheres had arrived at their respective ends in the discovery of the ātman and Brahman, it was easy to equate the two as being the same spiritual ‘energy’ that informs both the outer world and the inner self. This equation had important implications for later philosophical growth. The above conceptions of the self-identity question find expression in the six systems of Hindu thought. These are known as āstikadarśanas or ways of seeing the self without rejecting the authority of the Vedas. Often, one system or the other may not explicitly state their allegiance to the Vedas, but unlike Buddhism or Jainism, they did not openly repudiate Vedic authority. Thus they were āstikadarśanas as opposed to the others who were nāstikadarśanas. The word darśana for philosophy is also significant if one realizes that philosophy does not end with only an intellectual knowing of one’s self-identity but also culminates in realizing it and truly becoming it.

Costume and the Self-Extension: The Functions of Costume in Elmer Gantry from the Perspective of Material Culture

2010 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 474-478
Author(s):  
J.W. Luo ◽  
K. Yu
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Nobel Prize Winner ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
The Usa

As the other creation of material culture, clothes have concrete forms, and reflect the wearer’s taste and appreciation of beauty while provide certain social significance. This paper attempts to analyze the connection between the costume of the hero Elmer Gantry in the novel Elmer Gantry and his self-identity, then to discover how the novelist, Sinclair Lewis ,the first Nobel Prize winner in the USA, by describing the costume of the character, explores the different inner self-identities of one man.

Rethinking Non-self

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tse-fu Kuan
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Buddhist Text ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

Scholars have pointed out that the arguments for not-self (anatt?, or “non-self”) recurring in the Buddhist texts are meant to refute the “self” (?tman) in the Upani?ads. The Buddha’s denial of the self, however, was not only pointed at Brahmanism, but also confronted various ?rama?ic trends of thought against Brahmanism. This paper investigates the extant three versions of a Buddhist text which records a debate between the Buddha and Saccaka, an adherent of a certain ?rama?ic sect, over the relationship of the self and the five aggregates (khandha). There exist divergences among the three versions in regard to the account of this debate. The account in sutta 35 of the Majjhima Nik?ya is generally consistent with that in s?tra 110 of the Sa?yukta ?gama in Chinese translation, whereas s?tra 10 of Chapter 37 of the Ekottarika ?gama in Chinese translation tells a very different story. Judging from Saccaka’s title, Niga??haputta, and his background as given in the Pali commentary, he was an adherent of Jainism. This paper demonstrates that Saccaka’s view, which was refuted by the Buddha, as stated in the two similar versions has nothing to do with Jainism, but rather it is an “invention” created by distorting Brahmanical thought. This “invention” has led the Pali commentaries and contemporary scholars to interpret the ‘self’ denied by the Buddha as what comes under one’s mastery or control, and to understand the statement “Each of the five aggregates is not self” in the Buddhist texts as denying the idea that each of the five aggregates can be seen as what comes under control. This, however, misses the point. The mainstream thought in India at that time conceived the ‘self’ or the essence of the individual or of the universe as a ‘controller’, and it is this concept that the Buddha exerted all his energy to overturn. Therefore, the account in those two versions of the text apparently has some mistake. As to the Ekottarika ?gama version of the text, Saccaka’s view as stated therein is very different from what is found in the above two versions. An examination of this version shows that the views rebutted by the Buddha are very similar to those of the ?j?vikas. Since the Buddhist texts frequently confuse the ?j?vikas with the Jains (Niga??ha), it is very likely that Saccaka was actually an adherent of the ?j?vika faith and that this discourse is meant to criticize the ?j?vika doctrines. Since the Ekottarika ?gama version seems to make better sense, this version may be fairly close to the original account, while the other two versions have considerably deviated from the original. By comparing these three versions of the text, I also attempt to explore some important issues regarding the sectarian development of Buddhism, and to shed some light on the unique values of the Chinese Ekottarika ?gama, which is, in terms of sectarian affiliation, significantly distant from the Pali Majjhima Nik?ya and the Chinese Sa?yukta ?gama that belong to two closely related schools.

scholarly journals The spectrum of subjectal forms: Towards an Integral Semiotics

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (235) ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Sebastián Mariano Giorgi
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Integral Model ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Collective Dimension

AbstractWhat is the relationship between consciousness and semiosis? This article attempts to provide some clues to answer this question. For doing it, we explore the application of the Integral model to semiotics; that is to say, the metatheory that integrates the inside, the outside, the individual, and the collective dimension, on one hand and, on the other hand, the levels of development, states and types of consciousness. Our principal hypothesis is that the semiosis depends on the “subjectal” form where the self is located temporarily or permanently. To validate it, we analyze the way in which the universe of meaning changes between the self located below the subject (as a form), and the self located beyond of it. According to the Integral semiotics point of view outlined here, the relationship between consciousness and the meaning has to do with the reduction or expansion of the subjectal spectrum, and the trajectory of the self along of it.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The book’s epilogue explores the place of musical portraiture in the context of posthumous depictions of the deceased, and in relation to the so-called posthuman condition, which describes contemporary changes in the relationship of the individual with such aspects of life as technology and the body. It first examines Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to view how Bernard Herrmann’s score relates to issues of portraiture and the depiction of the identity of the deceased. It then considers the work of cyborg composer-artist Neil Harbisson, who has aimed, through the use of new capabilities of hybridity between the body and technology, to convey something akin to visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. The epilogue shows how an examination of contemporary views of posthumous and posthuman identities helps to illuminate the ways music represents the self throughout the genre of musical portraiture.

scholarly journals Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Origin ◽  
Greek Thought ◽  
Indian Thought ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Cosmic Order ◽  
Socio Economic Development ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Universe

This book focuses from various perspectives on the striking similarities (as well as the concomitant differences) between early Greek and early Indian thought. In both cultures there occurred at about the same time the birth of 'philosophy', the idea of the universe as an intelligible order in which personal deity is (at most) marginal and the inner self is at the centre of attention. The similarities include a pentadic structure of narrative and cosmology, a basic conception of cosmic order or harmony, a close relationship between universe and inner self, techniques of soteriological inwardness and self-immortalisation, the selflessness of theory, envisaging the inner self as a chariot, the interiorisation of ritual, and ethicised reincarnation. Explanations for the similarites are a shared Indo-European origin, parallel socio-economic development, and influence in one direction or the other.

Queer Structures of Religious Feeling: What Time Is Now?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Pellegrini
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Psychoanalysis And Religion ◽  
Time Out ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
The Times ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Queer Temporality

This essay asks what psychoanalysis and religion might have to say to each other in view of Freud’s secular aspirations and queer theory’s temporal turn. Both queer temporality and psychoanalysis offer resources for understanding the multiple ways time coats, codes, and disciplines the body in secular modernity. This is so even though psychoanalysis is one of these disciplines. Nevertheless, the times of psychoanalysis are multiple. On the one hand, psychoanalysis quite frequently lays down a teleology in which the individual subject matures along a set pathway. On the other hand, this developmental imperative is at profound odds with psychoanalysis’s capacity to make room for the co-existence of past and present in ways that confound secular time’s forward march. This latter recognition—co-temporality—may even lay down routes for the cultivation of “counter-codes” (Foucault’s term), ways of living and experiencing and telling time out of sync with the linear logics of what José Muñoz has called “straight time.”

Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-164
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenal Experience ◽  
Mental Process ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Louise Bourgeois ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Over a decade before the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis in New York (1952–1985), her work mined territories of psyche, body, home, and exile. Bourgeois’s papers from 1940 onward reveal that she shared Freud’s description of neurotics, hysterics, and artists as suffering from reminiscences. Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn identified the last of these in 1943 as “war neuroses,” just six years before Bourgeois debuted her first mature sculptures. These abstract “personages” served as melancholy surrogates for lost objects, the friends and family Bourgeois left in 1938 in Occupied France. In the 1960s, she further reduced the body to ambivalent amalgams of part-objects made from plaster and latex, suggesting swollen nodes, skin, and sex organs. Of particular interest are two papers published by Fairbairn in 1938 that extend the inner world of the individual to the field of object relations via the transposition of the symbolically “restored object.” Fairbairn conceived the radical notion of restitution, the mental process of repairing damage in the artist’s inner object world. These principles resonate with Bourgeois’s métier and a postwar sculptural aesthetic that probed the phenomenal experience of anxiety, exile, and psychoanalysis on the Self and others.

Self-limitation as the basis of environmentally sustainable care of the self

Human Affairs ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sťahel
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Global Environment ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Primary Interest ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Environmentally Sustainable ◽  
Global Era ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
The Individual

AbstractWhen we abandon the neoliberal fiction that one is independent on the grounds that it is a-historic and antisocial, we realize that everyone is dependent and interdependent. In a media-driven society the self-identity of the individual is formed within the framework of the culture-ideology of consumerism from early childhood. As a result, both the environmental and social destruction have intensified. In the global era, or in the era of the global environmental crisis, self-identity as a precondition for environmentally sustainable care of the self should be based on the culture-ideology of human rights and responsibilities, and on conscious self-limitation which realizes that one’s prosperity and security cannot come at the expense of others. Care of the self is about ensuring the habitability of the global environment as the primary interest of each individual.

scholarly journals XIV.—Ancient Gold Ornaments: described by John Yonge Akerman, Esq. Secretary

Archaeologia ◽  
1853 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 190-193
Author(s):  
John Yonge Akerman
Keyword(s):  
Light Chain ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Plate Viii ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Small Loop ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right ◽  
Of Greece

With the exception of Figs. 1, 2, 3, the Gold Ornaments engraved in Plate VIII. have no reference whatever to each other. The first three were obtained by Viscount Strangford, Director of the Society, from a Greek priest at Milo, in the year 1820. Figs. 1 and 3 appear to have formed the ends of a light chain, and the other (fig. 2) to have been pendent by a small loop on the top of the head. The figure has unfortunately lost the feet and the left hand, but the other parts are perfect. The right hand is raised in an admonitory attitude. The forehead appears as if encircled with a wreath, while the body is crossed by what would seem to be intended for the tendril of a vine. The necklace was formerly in the collection of the late Mr. H. P. Borrell, of Smyrna, but I am informed by his brother, Mr. Maximilian Borrell, who now possesses it, that no record exists of its discovery, and that he cannot learn the name of the individual from whom it was purchased. It was well known that Mr. H. P. Borrell was in the habit of purchasing ancient coins, which were sent to him from all parts of Greece and Asia-Minor, and that many rare and unique specimens fell into his hands, of which he contributed descriptions in various volumes of the Numismatic Chronicle. The necklace may, therefore, have been included in one of these numerous consignments, and we can scarcely indulge the hope that the place of its discovery will ever be made known. As an example of ancient art, it may vie with the most elaborate and beautiful specimens of goldsmiths' work of any age or period. The details are wonderfully minute and delicate, even the backs of the button-like objects at the ends of the pendent cords being elaborately finished.

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