scholarly journals Modernism, Mysticism and the Pursuit of Freedom - Bringing the initial instinct of the Modernists to its fulfilment in the model of the Christian mystic

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 171-191
Author(s):  
Ludmiła Zofia Szczecina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
Interior Life

While one can certainly debate about the forms Modernism (in the artistic sense) manifested itself in and what actually qualified as Modernism, one cannot deny that the desire for freedom was one of its underlying tenets. In the 21st century it would seem however that the desire for freedom has not been satiated. In the following essay I will explore whether emancipating art from a moral authority achieved the freedom modernist artists so deeply desired and I will question whether severing himself from objective truth the artist was allowed to fully thrive. Comparing Modernist concept’s (Stream of consciousness, that art should reflect reality and the emphasis on subjectivity etc.) with the fundamentals of Christian mysticism (i.e. the interior life) and by reconciling subjective experience with objective truth through the use of St John Paul II’s philosophical anthropology – I hope to pose an alternative path to satiate, truly satiate, the Modernist’s thirst for freedom.

scholarly journals The Ethical Experience of Nature: Aristotle and the Roots of Ecological Phenomenology

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan B. Van der Schyff
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Deep Ecology ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Environmental Challenges ◽  
Moral Meaning ◽  
Ethical Experience ◽  
The Way

I demonstrate here how Aristotle's teleological conception of nature has been largely misunderstood in the scientific age and I consider what his view might offer us with regard to the environmental challenges we face in the 21st century. I suggest that in terms of coming to an ethical understanding of the creatures and things that constitute the ecosystem, Aristotle offers a welcome alternative to the rather instrumental conception of the natural world and low estimation of subjective experience our contemporary techno-scientific culture espouses. Among other things, I consider how his conception of orexis and eudaimonia (happiness or, as I prefer here, "the flourishing life") might be extended to include the eco-system itself, thus allowing us to better understand the moral meaning of nature. I conclude with a look at the way in which modern phenomenology re-addresses the fundamental Greek concern with ontology, meaning and human authenticity. I consider the ways in which phenomenology reasserts the value of direct human experience that was so important to Aristotle; and I consider how this view, and that of Deep ecology, may help us to experience nature - and all of Being for that matter - in a more authentic, meaningful and altogether ethical light.

Liberalism and Locke's Philosophical Anthropology

2019 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-205
Author(s):  
Graedon Zorzi
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relational Concept ◽  
Divine Law

AbstractPerhaps in part because of an issue related to chronology of publications, the connections between Locke's liberalism and philosophical anthropology are underappreciated. This essay addresses that issue and re-examines Locke's account of the person, treating it as an interpretive key to Locke's political thought. Locke'spersonis, contra the standard readings, a relational concept that refers to beings capable of law in terms of their accountability to law; descendants of Adam are equal as persons in that they hold identical rights (or prerogatives) and duties under the divine law. This philosophical anthropology leads to a principle—eschatological accountability delimits legitimate moral and political authority, so authority over a person is necessarily limited by that person's accountability to God—that helps to clarify certain misunderstandings of the status of moral authority within Lockean liberalism and to explain how Locke set the terms of subsequent debates about the limits of political authority.

scholarly journals What Can the Temporal Structure of Auditory Perception Tell Us about Musical “Timelessness”?

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason D. K. Noble
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Temporal Organization ◽  
Human Information Processing ◽  
Experience Of Time

“Timelessness” is an area of intense interest for many composers and authors interested in 20th- and 21st-century music, but it is not always clear exactly what the term denotes. In particular, the distinction between theinductionof timelessness (the listener’s subjective experience of time is altered or suspended by music) and theperceptionof timelessness (the listener recognizes that the music expresses altered or suspended time) has yet to be clarified. This paper argues that, while experiences of timelessness may beinducedby a wide variety of musics and are not necessarily contingent on specific musical qualities, theperceptionof musical timelessness involves relationships between music’s temporal organization and the temporal structure of auditory perception. Of particular interest are segmentation, sequence, pulse, meter, and repetition. Music whose temporal organization optimizes human information processing and embodiment expresses “human time,” and music whose temporal organization subverts or exceeds human information processing and embodiment points outside of human time, to timelessness. This hypothesis is illustrated with examples from the 20th-century repertoire by Truax, Ligeti, Crumb, Reich, Tenney, Messiaen, and Grisey, music that has been associated with timelessness.

Neurosurgery and consciousness: historical sketch and future possibilities

2012 ◽  
Vol 117 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harutomo Hasegawa ◽  
Graham A. Jamieson ◽  
Keyoumars Ashkan
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Intracranial Recording ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Historical Sketch

Neurosurgery has played an important role in the development of neuroscience and the science of consciousness. In this paper, the authors reflect on some of the historical contributions of neurosurgeons to the science of consciousness and discuss the ways in which clinical neurosurgery can contribute to the science of consciousness in the 21st century. An approach to the “hard problem” is proposed based on the principles of psychophysics, and the opportunities offered by intracranial recording and stimulation in patients capable of reporting changes in subjective experience are discussed. Such an approach will allow the systematic study and description of the bridging relationships between neurobiology and conscious experience.

scholarly journals Predicting lapses of attention with sleep-like slow waves

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Andrillon ◽  
Angus Burns ◽  
Teigane Mackay ◽  
Jennifer Windt ◽  
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Slow Waves ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Attentional Lapses ◽  
Healthy Participants ◽  
Local Sleep

AbstractAttentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we studied the behaviour, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants performing a task. Random interruptions prompted participants to indicate their mental states as task-focused, mind-wandering or mind-blanking. Using high-density electroencephalography, we report here that spatially and temporally localized slow waves, a pattern of neural activity characteristic of the transition toward sleep, accompany behavioural markers of lapses and preceded reports of mind wandering and mind blanking. The location of slow waves could distinguish between sluggish and impulsive behaviours, and between mind wandering and mind blanking. Our results suggest attentional lapses share a common physiological origin: the emergence of local sleep-like activity within the awake brain.

scholarly journals Musical Metaphors in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Victor Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Pablo Picasso ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
David Hockney

Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century. Inspired by Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, the poem in turn inspired Michael Tippett’s sonata for solo guitar, “The Blue Guitar” (Tippett 1983) and David Hockney’s The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso (Hockney and Stevens 1977). Central to “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the metaphor of the musical instrument as a transformational symbol of the imagination is common in Stevens’s poems. The structure of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” according to J. Hillis Miller, is the structure of stream-of-consciousness. Stevens’s poem creates what has been called “the deconstructed moment in modern poetry,” “an attempt to project a spatialized time that can be viewed from the privileged position of a timeless, static moment capable of encompassing a life at a glance” (Jackson 1982). This consciousness, which Derrida refers to as the “trace,” Stevens calls “the evasive movement of language.” The trace is the perception of the absence of meaning after the word or perception has passed, the glimpse of a hidden meaning that immediately vanishes. Stevens’s poem influenced not only other poets, artists and composers; references to and echoes of his ideas and techniques can be seen in popular music and culture well into the 21st century.

scholarly journals Socialist Economic Development in the 21st Century

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nghiem Phu Kien Cuong ◽  
Bui Quang Khiem
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Socioeconomic Development ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
New Class ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
Socialist Economic ◽  
Economic Construction ◽  
Successes And Failures

Over a hundred years after the first socialist revolution broke the global monopoly of capitalism, a new class of socialist-oriented socioeconomic development is coming to the fore. Capitalism is still dominant worldwide, although its hegemony is no longer undisputed, and humankind is now faced with a key existential challenge. This book proposes an alternative path to overcoming the worldwide crisis of globalized capitalism. It offers a novel, balanced, and historically rooted interpretation of the successes and failures of socialist economic construction throughout the last century.

Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness in Psychotic Disorders

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 434-444
Author(s):  
Andreas Heinz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Psychotic Disorders ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Psychotic Experiences ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Disorders Of The Self

Disorders of the self figure prominently in psychotic experiences. Subjects de­scribe that “alien” thoughts are inserted in their mind by foreign powers, can sometimes hear their thoughts aloud or describe complex voices interacting with each other. Such experiences can be conceptualized in the framework of a Philosophical Anthropology, which suggests that human experience is characterized by centric and excentric positionality: subjects experience their environment centered around their enlived body and at the same time can reflect upon their place in a shared lifeworld from an excentric point of view. Pre-reflective self awareness has been suggested to ensure that subjects can identify their own thoughts or actions as belonging to themselves, even when they reflect upon them from an excentric point of view. This pre-reflective self awareness appears to be impaired during psychotic experiences, when subjects no longer identify thoughts in their own stream of consciousness as belonging to themselves and instead attribute them to an outside agent. Among several potential causes, it is suggested that such impairments can be due to discrimi­natory or traumatic experiences, which affect the enlived (centric) position of a person and make her feel encircled and deeply threatened by aversive powers. As a consequence, the afflicted individual may fundamentally distance herself from her current centric position in a hostile environment, at the price of experiencing her own thoughts or actions as alien. Philosophical Anthropology may thus help to explain how social exclusion, discrimination and traumatization can promote psychotic experiences and why social support is of primary importance for any treatment of psychosis.

scholarly journals Now I Can See the Moon

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Namdrol Miranda Adams
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Contemplative Education ◽  
Interior Life ◽  
Contemplative Studies ◽  
Great Possibility ◽  
The Relationship

Contemplative education dawns in the 21st century with great possibility. Thus far, the field resonates with life and promises to expand American educational pedagogies with ideas of new epistemologies, dynamics, and languaging around why, how, and whom we educate. Much work has been done on the analysis of the threads that may inform contemplative studies, from our own culture and that of others, and this article adds to that body of work, exploring ways that western pedagogical strategies might inform contemplative education, most specifically in terms of purpose, the interior life of faculty, and the relationship with students.

Phenomenological Research in Schizophrenia: From Philosophical Anthropology to Empirical Science

1994 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Phenomenological Research ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Phenomenological Method ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Theoretical Issues

AbstractThe subjective experience of schizophrenia, its cause, and its course have been consistent topics of interest within the phenomenological tradition since its inception. After 80 years of study and the efforts of many investigators, however, phenomenological contributions have so far had only a modest impact on current understandings of this disorder. In this article, the author reviews the methodological and theoretical issues involved in the development of a phenomenological approach to understanding schizophrenia. Drawing examples from his own empirical research, the author illustrates the three steps of description, understanding, and explanation required by an application of the phenomenological method to this empirical domain. He then considers obstacles to the acceptance of insights generated through this method by the mainstream psychiatric community. In conclusion, he suggests that the promise offered by a phenomenological approach will most likely be fulfilled when investigators appeal to the phenomenological conviction in intentionality to provide the guidelines for an empirical science of subjective life.

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