Infant as a Symbolism of Goodness and Innocence in Lao-Zi’s Dao De Jing and Heraclitus’ Fragments

Author(s):  
Lampros I. Papagiannis ◽  

In this article we shall try to explore the ethical aspects of the Dao De Jing and the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus based on the symbolism of the infant that they both use. At first a very short introduction needs to be made concerning the basis of morality and the difference between China and Greece. Needless to say we must take into account the general ethical context in the civilizations of ancient China and ancient Greece and indicate (if possible) whether the DDJ is to be seen as a strictly ethical/political text as well as whether Heraclitus’ fragments work as an ethical map for the people of his time and place. I intent to structure this article in two chapters each one dedicated to each of the philosophers along with a short introduction in the beginning. As far as the main chapters are concerned the Lao-Zi’s DDJ will be analyzed at first from the perspective of ethics in connection to the symbol of the infant not rarely used by Lao-Zi. Secondly I shall deal with the ethical thought of Heraclitus and his perspective of the infant found in some of his fragments. Let us keep in mind that apart from the fragments themselves, the witnesses (i.e. stories about his life) play a not less important role in our extracting his philosophical opinions. Lastly we shall try to come to a conclusion concerning the similarities and dissimilarities between Lao-Zi and Heraclitus regarding their views on ethics and especially regarding the use of the infant as a symbol or a pattern.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Douglas Chiguvi ◽  
Elvis Madondo ◽  
Ruramayi Tadu

The main purpose of study is to analyse the credibility of traditional and online media for the promotion of tourism in the contemporary tourism marketing environment in Durban South Africa. Explanatory research design was employed and the questionnaire was used to collect the data. The study findings revealed that traditional media and online media are more or less equally competitive for the promotion of tourism. The study also revealed that international visitors have a positive attitude towards online media than traditional media while domestic tourists have a positive attitude towards traditional media than online media. Traditional media was revealed to be highly credible than the general perception of the people and it is a lot more credible than online media. The survival of traditional media is not threatened by online media and traditional media is still working well alongside online media. The study concluded and recommended that tourism marketers and authorities need to come to terms with traditional media and online media coexistence. There is no need to rely on one media to do it all. Where traditional media lacks, online media must be there to make up the difference and enhance the tourist’s experience.


parmigiana and it sticks in my throat because I know how much he loved it. I’m eating for two, if indeed I’ve incorporated him a la ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (M, 69). I keep coming up against this network of references in your fiction: the loss of the father, the idea of mourning as a lump in the throat impeding communication, and above all a sense of resulting perplexity and confusion. It seems important that Paige’s harrowing recollection of her father in ‘To Find Words’ leads to her feeling ‘lost at sea and cast in doubt’ (MR, 25). It’s a question of narrative again… LT: Writing is always about loss in some way. Maybe for me my father’s loss became the loss that took in all loss, which made me want to write in the beginning. But there’s a way in which death is too easy, because death is everyone’s conclusion. Death is the closure that’s never closure. Because even if someone dies there are those alive who remember him or her. So the impact of that person’s life is still felt in the people living after. I’m thinking about the AIDS epidemic. There’s nothing conclusive about death except that it’s something we all do. That’s the curious thing about the paradox of using death—in a way I know that whenever I put death in my work it’s the most vital thing to do, because we all feel so connected to it. PN: In interviews you’ve often talked about Cast in Doubt in terms of a collision of modernist and postmodernist perspectives. Does the difference again have to do with conceptions of narrative? LT: I wanted to do many things in that book, including figuring out how to tell a story that reflected on story-telling and on how we read stories. PN: It does seem that Horace can only reach a sense of self by seeing himself as a character in a story. There’s a curious passage where he says ‘While I accept the Greek version of destiny, or fate, as in tragedy, when one’s end flows from one’s flaws, from hubris, I abhor the idea that one’s life is fated’ (C, 160). But the Greeks couldn’t dissociate those ideas, and are you suggesting that Horace ultimately can’t either (his novel is, after all, called Household Gods…)? LT: That is a strange passage. I think I wanted, because I was playing off the Greek material, the notion of an inevitability, certain things set in motion, from x to y to z. But as a modernist, Horace also wants to think about progress and about his own ability to insert himself in the story and make a change. There’s a certain kind of optimism in that, but it’s confused. He’s confused by two kinds of narrative, the narrative of inevitability and the narrative of change.

2005 ◽  
pp. 60-60

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 656-676
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk

The article examines the main forms and methods of agitation and propagandistic activities of monarchic parties in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Among them the author singles out such ones as periodical press, publication of books, brochures and flyers, organization of manifestations, religious processions, public prayers and funeral services, sending deputations to the monarch, organization of public lectures and readings for the people, as well as various philanthropic events. Using various forms of propagandistic activities the monarchists aspired to embrace all social groups and classes of the population in order to organize all-class and all-estate political movement in support of the autocracy. While they gained certain success in promoting their ideology, the Rights, nevertheless, lost to their adversaries from the radical opposition camp, as the monarchists constrained by their conservative ideology, could not promise immediate social and political changes to the population, and that fact was excessively used by their opponents. Moreover, the ideological paradigm of the Right camp expressed in the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” formula no longer agreed with the social and economic realities of Russia due to modernization processes that were underway in the country from the middle of the 19th century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
С. И. Дудник ◽  
И. Д. Осипов

The article discusses the problems of evolution and the formation of the ideology of an enlightened monarchy in Russia. In this regard, the philosophical and political ideas of Catherine the Great, as well as their theoretical and ideological premises, are analyzed. It is noted that the philosophy of education in Russia was closely connected with the concepts of Voltaire, Didro, Montesquieu, Beccaria, Bentham, their views on natural law and human freedom, humanism and the rule of law. These concepts in the philosophy of Catherine received a specific interpretation, due to the sociocultural conditions of Russia. This was manifested in the famous work of Catherine the Great “The Nakaz”, which recognized Montesquieu's argument in favor of the autocracy, but at the same time, his point of view on the separation of powers was rejected. The specificity of the doctrine of enlightened monarchy lies in the combination of liberal and conservative values, which form eclectic forms. This was the dialectic of the supreme power, the difference between the enlightened monarchy and the ideology of absolutism. The article also notes that education in Russia is associated with fundamental socio-political reforms, processes of secularization of culture. At this time, the natural and human sciences are developing. The changes positively influenced the development of medicine, beautification of towns and public education. Also considered are the views on the autocracy of the opposition nobility intelligentsia: A. N. Radishchev and noted that his criticism of the autocracy was determined by an alternative cultural policy, proceeding from the protection of the interests of the people. The doctrine of enlightened monarchy is characterized by internal worldview inconsistency and political inconsistency, which did not allow solving the pressing social problems of the establishment of legal state, democratization of society and the abolition of serfdom.


1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 327-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Bravman

In September 1987, early in my research at the Kenya National Archives, I came across a collection of photographs taken by a British missionary during the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection contained nearly 250 photos of the terrain and people of Kenya's Taita Hills, where I would soon be going for my fieldwork. I pored over the photo collection for a long time, and had reproductions made of twenty-five shots. The names of those pictured had been recorded in the photo album's captions. Many of the names were new to me, though a few WaTaita of the day who had figured prominently in the archival records were also captured on film. When I moved on to Taita in early 1988,1 took the photographs with me. Since I would be interviewing men and women old enough either to remember or be contemporaries of the people in the pictures, I planned to show the photos during the interviews. At first I was simply curious about who some of the people pictured were, but my curiosity quickly evolved into a more ambitious plan. I decided to try using the photographs as visual prompts to get people to speak more expansively than they otherwise might about their lives and their experiences.In the event, I learned that using the photographs in interviews involved many more complexities than I had envisaged in my initial enthusiasm. I found that I had to alter the expectations and techniques I took to Taita, and feel out some of the limitations of working with the photographic medium. I had to recognize the power relations embedded in my presence as a researcher in Taita, in my position as bearer of images from peoples' pasts, and in the photos themselves. I found, too, that I needed to come to grips with a number of issues about the politics of image production, and the historical product of those politics: the bounded, selected images that are photographs. Finally, I had to address some of my own cultural assumptions about photography and how people respond to pictures, assumptions that my informants did not necessarily share.


1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Włodzimierz Jelonek

The aim of this paper is to give certain conditions characterizing ruled affine surfaces in terms of the Blaschke structure (∇, h, S) induced on a surface (M, f) in ℝ3. The investigation of affine ruled surfaces was started by W. Blaschke in the beginning of our century (see [1]). The description of affine ruled surfaces can be also found in the book [11], [3] and [7]. Ruled extremal surfaces are described in [9]. We show in the present paper that a shape operator S is a Codazzi tensor with respect to the Levi-Civita connection ∇ of affine metric h if and only if (M, f) is an affine sphere or a ruled surface. Affine surfaces with ∇S = 0 are described in [2] (see also [4]). We also show that a surface which is not an affine sphere is ruled iff im(S - HI) =ker(S - HI) and ket(S - HI) ⊂ ker dH. Finally we prove that an affine surface with indefinite affine metric is a ruled affine sphere if and only if the difference tensor K is a Codazzi tensor with respect to ∇.


1997 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Marcelo Lopes de Souza

Governability is quite ofien used as an "umbrella concept", under which both the capacity of governance (manner in which power is exercised in the management of a territory) and the governability in the strict sense of the word (acceptation of the social and political status quo by the people) are subsumed. The first part of this article underlies the difference between these two concepts The second part examines facts in relation to governance and governability problems in Rio de Janeiro, and discusses some ideologically generated current exaggerations about the governability crisis in this metropolis, as suggested by the experience of the 1980s and 1990s.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Kathryn Cyrus

Purpose Overview of coaching for recovery. The paper aims to show an overview of work that was carried out over 11 years with groups of mental health and physical staff. As the facilitator who had run this course for the duration in Nottingham, this was an excellent opportunity to be at the forefront of a brand new project. Design/methodology/approach The introduction of the skills are taught over two consecutive days followed by a further day a month later. The idea of coaching is to be enabled to find the answers in themselves by the use of powerful questions and using the technique of the grow model, combined with practice enables the brain to come up with its own answers. Using rapport and enabling effective communication to deliver the outcome. Findings Evidence from staff/clients and the purpose of the paper shows that when you step back it allows the individual patients/staff to allow the brain to process to create to come up with their solutions, which then helps them to buy into the process and creates ownership. Research limitations/implications The evidence suggests that the approach that was there prior to the course was very much a clinical approach to working with clients and treating the person, administering medication and not focussing on the inner person or personal recovery. The staff review has shown that in the clinical context change is happening from the inside out. Practical implications “Helps change culture”; “change of work practice”; “it changed staff focus – not so prescriptive”; “powerful questions let clients come to their own conclusions”; “coaching gives the ability to find half full. Helps to offer reassurance and to find one spark of hope”. Social implications This has shown that the approach is now person-centred/holistic. This has been the “difference that has made the difference”. When this paper looks at the issues from a different angle in this case a coaching approach, applying technique, knowledge and powerful questions the results have changed. The same clients, same staff and same problems but with the use of a different approach, there is the evidence of a different outcome, which speaks for itself. The coaching method is more facilitative, therefore it illicit’s a different response, and therefore, result. Originality/value The results/evidence starts with the individual attending and their commitment to the process over the two-day course. Then going away for the four weeks/six for managers and a commitment again to practice. Returning to share the impact if any with the group. This, in turn, helps to inspire and gain motivation from the feedback to go back to work invigorated to keep going.


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