scholarly journals The goal of education: spirituality or an intellectualism? An alternative to care of the self

2021 ◽  
Vol XII (2(35)) ◽  
pp. 185-194
Author(s):  
Hanna Stępniewska-Gębik
Keyword(s):  
Ethics Of Care ◽  
The Self ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Ethical Attitude ◽  
The World ◽  
Appropriate Practices ◽  
The Way

This article deals with the dilemma related to the purpose of upbringing. M. Foucault's concept of care of the self and J. Patočka's works allow us to ask questions about the goal of education. Is it to become an intellectual or a spiritual person? The possibility of such a distinction is embedded in the ethics of care of the self, an ancient tradition, which even nowadays, among others, thanks to P. Sloterdijk or Foucault himself, has become an important category. An ethical attitude towards the self opens the way to spirituality through a set of appropriate practices. It becomes the basis for relations with others and with the world.

Love and Unselfing in Iris Murdoch

2020 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 169-180
Author(s):  
Julia Driver
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Iris Murdoch ◽  
True Self ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

AbstractIris Murdoch believes that unselfing is required for virtue, as it takes us out of our egoistic preoccupations, and connects us to the Good in the world. Love is a form of unselfing, illustrating how close attention to another, and the way they really are, again, takes us out of a narrow focus on the self. Though this view of love runs counter to a view that those in love often overlook flaws in their loved ones, or at least down-play them, I argue that it is compatible with Murdoch's view that love can overlook some flaws, ones that do not speak to the loved one's true self. Unselfing requires that we don't engage in selfish delusion, but a softer view of our loved ones is permitted.

David Brown's Divine Humanity

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-113
Author(s):  
Kathryn Tanner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
The Self ◽  
Primary Indication ◽  
The World ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
The Way

The contributions of this fine book are many but I will concentrate on three, before turning to several more critical remarks.First, and most obviously, the book does the invaluable service of surveying developments in kenotic christology in the nineteenth century while situating them nicely in their different contexts of origin and with reference to lines of mutual influence: continental, Scottish and British trends are all canvassed rather masterfully. Some attention, in lesser detail, is also given to the way these christological trends are extended in the twentieth century to accounts of the Trinity and God's relation to the world generally: kenosis, the self-emptying or self-limiting action of God, in the incarnation, is now viewed as a primary indication of who God is and how God works, from creation to salvation.

scholarly journals Evil, Feminism, and a Philosophy of Transformation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverley Clack
Keyword(s):  
Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Suffering ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
The World ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
The Way

Rather than offering another ‘solution’ to the problem of evil, in the form of, say, a theodicy, the discussion of this chapter is situated within an ethical framework concerned with unmasking the enactment and perpetuation of ‘structural evils’ on the political and social levels. Indebted to the insights of feminist philosophers such as Michèle Le Doeuff, but also Hannah Arendt’s analysis of evil, the novelist Muriel Spark, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social suffering, the chapter seeks, not to justify the ways of God, but to critique and transform unjust structures, and to pave the way for alternatives that might best support human flourishing. This necessitates attempting to identify and understand the sources of human wickedness—social and individual—while contending that, ultimately, the only appropriate response to evil and suffering is to commit to a reorientation of the self towards others and the world.

scholarly journals The Role of Descartes’s Dream in the Meditations and in the Historical Ontology of Ourselves

2018 ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Edward McGushin
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Historical Ontology ◽  
Negative Power ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Positive Source ◽  
The Way

This paper situates the dream-hypothesis in Descartes’s First Meditation within the historical ontology of ourselves. It looks at the way in which the dream enters into and transforms Descartes’ relation to his “system of actuality.” In order to get free from his confinement within his system of actuality – an actuality defined by relations of power-knowledge, government, veridiction, and subjectivity – Descartes draws on the disruptive, negative capacity of the dream. But, while Descartes draws on the dream to get himself free and to establish a way of thinking and living differently, he also disqualifies the dream as a positive source of knowledge, truth, or subjectivity. Excavating this ambivalent place of the dream in the genealogy of our present, we aim to recover the dream not only in its negative power but also to open up the possibility of re-imagining its positivity as a form of counter-conduct, problematization, and element in the care of the self. This paper represents one piece of a larger genealogical study that examines the history of relationships between the arts of dreaming and the problematization of power-truth-subjectivity.

scholarly journals To-Do Is to Be: Foucault, Levinas, and Technologically Mediated Subjectivation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Peter Bergen ◽  
Peter-Paul Verbeek
Keyword(s):  
Self Care ◽  
The Self ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Technological Mediation ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Technological Artifacts ◽  
Ethical Subjectivity ◽  
The World

AbstractThe theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actually support the process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents different ways in which the app may confront me with myself. Subsequently, it accounts for the motivation and shame that this technologically mediated confrontation with myself invokes through a Levinasian account of ethical subjectivity. In so doing, it also shows how Levinas’ phenomenology implies a responsibility for self-care and how nonhuman, technological others may still call me to responsibility. It concludes with a reflection on the role of gamification in technologically mediated subjectivation and some implications for design.

Data’s Intimacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-113
Author(s):  
Sun-ha Hong
Keyword(s):  
Internet Of Things ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Smart Machines ◽  
Market Driven ◽  
The Internet Of Things ◽  
Better Than

Today, machines observe, record, and sense the world—not just for us but also often instead of us and indifferently to our meaning. The intertwined problems of technological knowledge and (our) knowledge of technology manifest in the growing industry of smart machines, the Internet of Things, and other means for self-tracking. The automation of the care of the self is buoyed by a popular fantasy of data’s intimacy, of machines that know you better than yourself. Yet as the technology becomes normalized, the hacker ethic gives way to a market-driven shift in which more and more of “my” personal truth is colonized by machines (and the people behind the machines) that I cannot question.

Jean Rhys and drunken consciousness (1929–1939)

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Gender Consciousness ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Way

Jean Rhys published four novels which have female protagonists who all drink at levels beyond those regarded as socially acceptable: Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939). These four novels present the reader with a complex of self, consciousness, and modernity, inflected by an argument that women are forced to live differently in the world from men, and therefore experience and understand the world differently from men. One of the major achievements of the novels is the way in which they render the various states of consciousness of the female protagonist in the modern capitalist world, and this chapter considers the way in which Rhys integrates questions of gender, consciousness, modernity, alcohol and the self. Rhys’s protagonists choose their orientations as a way to define their selves and to define what is true in and about the world they inhabit. The modernist focus on alcoholic consciousness ensures a form of self-validation against a patriarchal and increasingly rationalistic society. This chapter also considers Rhys’s presentation of consciousness alongside our contemporary understanding.

Dress for Success: A Journey from Past to Present Among Tibetans

Costume ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Patrizia Bassini
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Han Chinese ◽  
The Self ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This article examines the problem of what to wear among Tibetans in Qinghai, China. Starting with recent media coverage, which reported how Tibetan traditional attire is becoming a powerful political statement, I will attempt to illustrate how the dramatic transformations in the way Tibetans dress are not a new phenomenon but an ongoing process of the past fifty years. From the analysis of people’s narratives and extended participant observation, it emerges that the choice of garments is of real concern to many Tibetan people as it communicates messages about the self and their position in the world. I contend that Tibetan men especially have strategically taken to wearing Western-style suits in an attempt to enact Han Chinese economic success.

scholarly journals Mapping the Self: Leonora Carrington’s Journey through the Mad Mind in Down Below

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-129
Author(s):  
Laura de la Parra Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Central Element ◽  
The Self ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

This article examines the Map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1944). Carrington’s Surrealist memoir about madness, first dictated in French and then translated into and published in English, recounts her experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton’s Nadja (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, I argue that the way in which Carrington narrates her experience of madness is a means to gather knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as part of the authoritarian state. Thus, I explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates a form of truth that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian Self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of experiencing—or creating—the Self, while she also challenges both the normative Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing.

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