The Hermeneutic Conception of Culture

Author(s):  
Rui Sampaio

Heidegger, the founder of the hermeneutic paradigm, rejected the traditional account of cultural activity as a search for universally valid foundations for human action and knowledge. His main work, Sein und Zeit (1927), develops a holistic epistemology according to which all meaning is context-dependent and permanently anticipated from a particular horizon, perspective or background of intelligibility. The result is a powerful critique directed against the ideal of objectivity. Gadamer shares with Heidegger the hermeneutic reflections developed in Sein und Zeit and the critique of objectivity, describing the cultural activity as an endless process of "fusions of horizons." On the one hand, this is an echo of the Heideggerian holism, namely, of the thesis that all meaning depends on a particular interpretative context. On the other hand, however, this concept is an attempt to cope with the relativity of human existence and to avoid the dangers of a radical relativism. In fact, through an endless, free and unpredictable process of fusions of horizons, our personal horizon is gradually expanded and deprived of its distorting prejudices in such a way that the educative process (Bildung) consists in this multiplication of hermeneutic experiences. Gadamer succeeds therefore in presenting a non-foundationalist and non-teleological theory of culture.

The article analyzed the problem of mnemotechnic of pain in the context of the historical transformation of thinking from archaic bodily practices of graphism of pain to the modern culture of anesthesia. The conceptual knot, which forms pain, suffering, memory, procedures of designation and enjoyment, is defined. Subject is defined to be central that goes beyond the opposition/dialectic of myth and reason. This allows us to turn to the premythic and to analyze the graphism of pain as the basis of human existence in the context of the formation of individual and collective memory. In the meantime, the myth is interpreted as an attempt to portray the labeled physical bodies of the world, given the distinction between them. The formation of relations of power is associated with the establishment of a correlation between sign and pain, which makes it possible to understand of pain as the basis of social memory. On the other hand, the historical-philosophical subject is distinguished, according to which the bodily topical of the perceptions and the metabodily topic of concepts are distinguished. The metaphysical shift laid down by the ancient philosophers transforms mnemotechnic into practice, which constantly takes into account the distinction between the sensual (physical) and the supersensual (spiritual), the ideal and the real, the true and the false, the one and the plural, being and non-existence. Mnemotechnic, which constitutes the metaphysical world, excludes the body as a matter of memory, leaving the pain beyond the added significance. Probably, it is possible to link the excesses of Sade’s search for enjoyment and cases of dramatic erosion of man to naked bodility, which captures the outbreaks of violence and torture in the century. In the end, it transforms modern culture into a culture of anesthesia, a culture of memory as an anesthetic, directed against the repetition of pain. Nevertheless, at the same time, it causes new pleasures to seek pain.


Author(s):  
Iurii I. Semenchenko ◽  

The article deals with the specific features of the voice phenomenon representation and the peculiarities of its functioning in French-language short stories written by Beckett, namely in Premier amour (First Love), Le calmant (The Calmative) and Au loin un oiseau. The abovementioned texts allow us, on the one hand, to demonstrate the genesis of the writer’s artistic and aesthetic principles of representing the studied phenomenon, which were later reflected in theatrical, radio and television plays, and, on the other hand, – to shed light on the specificity of the literary world of these texts. The research conducted allows us to conclude that in all the analyzed texts the voice is captured in different forms of representation and has a varying (from text to text) functionality. In Premier amour, there is a feminine voice asking to restore the corporeality and individuality of its origin. However, the stamp of convulsiveness in the heroine’s voice paradoxically has its source not in the corporeal but in the ideal. In Le calmant, the protagonist’s feebleness, expressed by the signs of his corporeal conditions, is doubled by his aphony, which thus transcends one of the most important motifs for Beckett’s writing – that of human weakness. This motif also reveals here another shade of meaning – weakness as a ‘respite’ from the suffering which human existence bears. Finally, in Au loin un oiseau we see a ventriloquist character. Due to the ‘I’ living inside, the ‘He’ is becoming similar to ventriloquists. Unlike them, however, his speaking capacity is under control of the narrator.


Author(s):  
I.V. Romanovskaya

On the material of the poem “Aniara” by the Swedish writer, Nobel laureate H. Martinson, the problem of the motif of light and its connection with the plot, figurative, space-time and ideological plans of the work is developed. The poem is characterized by extraordinary unity created due to the interweaving of two motifs - light and darkness, each of which is semantic and participates in the “framing” of the text both at the plot level and the semantic one. The motif of light is the most important component of the poem which reveals the main theme and the problem of the work, conveys the writer`s worldview and participates in the figurative expression of the author`s intention. The motif is associated with the problems of human existence and understanding of the moral meaning of life. The article reveals that light has both a positive and a negative semantic: on the one hand, it symbolizes utopian hopes for the future and idyllic ideas about the past (light as a symbol of the search for the ideal), on the other hand, human evil (light as a symbol of the destructive force of fire). This motif plays a key role in creating a holistic “light” space - the planet Dorisburg and a generalized image of a person turned out to be unable to preserve “the temple of light and kindness”.


2020 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Goral

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of folk poetics in the novel Pleasant things. Utopia by T. Bołdak-Janowska. The category of folklore is understood in a rather narrow way, and at the same time it is most often used in critical and literary works as meaning a set of cultural features (customs and rituals, beliefs and rituals, symbols, beliefs and stereotypes) whose carrier is the rural folk. The analysis covers such elements of the work as place, plot, heroes, folk system of values, folk rituals, customs, and symbols. The description is conducted based on the analysis of source material as well as selected works in the field of literary text analysis and ethnolinguistics. The analysis shows that folk poetics was creatively associated with the elements of fairy tales and fantasy in the studied work, and its role consists of – on the one hand – presenting the folk world represented and – on the other – presenting a message about the meaning of human existence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-277
Author(s):  
Tzu-Lung Chiu
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

Vinaya rules embody the ideal of how Buddhists should regulate their daily lives, and monastics are required to observe them, despite the fact that they were compiled nearly 2,500 years ago in India: a context dramatically different not only from Chinese Buddhism's present monastic conditions, but from its historical conditions. Against this backdrop, rules of purity (qinggui) were gradually formulated by Chinese masters in medieval times to supplement and adapt vinaya rules to China's cultural ethos and to specific local Chinese contexts. This study explores how the traditional qinggui are applied by the Buddhist sa?gha in present-day Taiwan, and contrasts modern monastics' opinions on these rules and their relation to early Buddhist vinaya, on the one hand, against classical Chan literature (such as Chanyuan qinggui) and the Buddhist canon (such as Dharmaguptakavinaya), on the other. This comparison fills a notable gap in the existing literature.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
SHINJINI DAS

AbstractThis article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.


2020 ◽  
pp. 174387212097533
Author(s):  
Johan van der Walt

This short article on Peter Fitzpatrick’s conception of “responsive law” analyzes the ambiguous temporality that Fitzpatrick discerned in modern law. On the one hand, law makes the claim of being fully present and therefore already and completely contained in itself. This aspect of law reflects the law’s claim to “immanence,” that is, its claim of always being able to rely strictly on its own operational terms without having to take recourse to any consideration not already contained within itself. It is this aspect of law that renders the ideal of the “rule of law” feasible. On the other hand, the law’s claim to doing justice to every unique and therefore every new case also demands that it takes leave of that which is already settled within it. This aspect of law can be called its “imminence.” The imminence of the law concerns the reality that law always finds itself on the threshold of that which has not yet been said and must still be said. The article shows how Fitzpatrick relied on Freud’s concept of the totem to explain the “wondrous” unity of its immanence and imminence.


Traditio ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 203-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDER ANDRÉE

The traditional account of the development of theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is that the emerging “academic” discipline of theology was separated from the Bible and its commentary, that the two existed on parallel but separate courses, and that the one developed in a “systematic” direction whereas the other continued to exist as a separate “practical” or “biblical-moral” school. Focusing largely on texts of an allegedly “theoretical” nature, this view misunderstands or, indeed, entirely overlooks the evidence issuing from lectures on the Bible — postills, glosses, and commentaries — notably the biblical Glossa “ordinaria.” A witness to an alternative understanding, Peter Comestor, master and chancellor of the cathedral school of Paris in the second half of the twelfth century, shows that theology was created as much from the continued study of the Bible as from any “systematic” treatise. Best known for his Historia scholastica, a combined explanation and rewrite of the Bible focusing on the historical and literal aspects of sacred history, Comestor used the Gloss as a textbook in his lectures on the Gospels both to elucidate matters of exegesis and to help him deduce doctrinal truth. Through a close reading of Comestor's lectures on the Gospel of John, this essay reevaluates the teaching of theology at the cathedral school of Paris in the twelfth century and argues that the Bible and its Gloss stood at the heart of this development.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (04) ◽  
pp. 1250040 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRIK LUNDSTRÖM ◽  
JOHAN ÖINERT

We introduce partially defined dynamical systems defined on a topological space. To each such system we associate a functor s from a category G to Topop and show that it defines what we call a skew category algebra A ⋊σ G. We study the connection between topological freeness of s and, on the one hand, ideal properties of A ⋊σ G and, on the other hand, maximal commutativity of A in A ⋊σ G. In particular, we show that if G is a groupoid and for each e ∈ ob (G) the group of all morphisms e → e is countable and the topological space s(e) is Tychonoff and Baire. Then the following assertions are equivalent: (i) s is topologically free; (ii) A has the ideal intersection property, i.e. if I is a nonzero ideal of A ⋊σ G, then I ∩ A ≠ {0}; (iii) the ring A is a maximal abelian complex subalgebra of A ⋊σ G. Thereby, we generalize a result by Svensson, Silvestrov and de Jeu from the additive group of integers to a large class of groupoids.


1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 531-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick W. Mote

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).


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