Pessimism and the Human Condition in the Hebrew Bible

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Human Condition

scholarly journals Elements of a History of the Soul in North-West Semitic Texts

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-176
Author(s):  
Joachim Schaper
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
North West ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract Amongst Hebrew Bible scholars the question of the understanding of biblical key terms and concepts pertaining to the human condition has attracted a fair amount of interest. And amongst those key terms and concepts it is the concept of nefeš that has proved to be particularly attractive and challenging. New light is thrown on the biblical concept by the recent discovery of the Katumuwa stele in Zincirli. The present article examines the evidence and draws conclusions with regard to the history of the concept of nefeš in the Hebrew Bible and in North-West Semitic literature and religion generally.

A Flood of Justice: The Scope of Justice in the Flood Narrative (Gen. 6:5–9:19)

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-370
Author(s):  
Merilyn Clark
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Values ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
Scope Of Justice ◽  
The Human Condition

AbstractThe scope of justice in the Hebrew Bible is often human-centred. Humankind is given pre-eminence, and God's responses are judged according to human values. However the flood story in Gen. 6:5–9:19 offers a very different view of justice. It locates justice within a complex web of relationships between God, humans, other life-forms and the earth itself. The creator-otherness of God permeates the story. The justice codified in the Noahic covenant takes into account the differing natures and resultant vulnerabilities inherent in the relationships between these differing participants. It is a justice that accepts the human condition, the human capacity for evil, violence and corruption, but seeks to limit its propensity to corrupt creation through regulation and by ceding to humans the responsibility for policing these regulations.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

Das Internet der Tiere: Natur 4.0 und die conditio humana

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera
Keyword(s):  
Industry 4.0 ◽  
Industrie 4.0 ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Conditio Humana ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Human Condition

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "

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