: Visions of Freedom

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noël O’Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Michael Oakeshott ◽  
Genuine Knowledge ◽  
The Human Condition

This chapter considers four of the most influential visions that characterized the response to totalitarianism, and in particular the various concepts of limit they provide, since those are the basis of the opposition which each vision sought to oppose to the totalitarian ideal. The first vision is the positivist one of Karl Popper, for whom the logic of scientific method offers the only genuine knowledge of man and society. The second great vision is that of Berlin, who abandons positivism and instead presents the human condition in tragic terms, on the grounds that it is intrinsically characterized by a plurality of incommensurable and conflicting values. A third vision situates positivism in a naturalistic portrait of the human condition. Finally, there is the ‘civil’ vision of Michael Oakeshott, which is ultimately grounded in a radical, anti-reductionist conception of human freedom.

scholarly journals Hans Jonas and Vasily Grossman: Reflections on the Human Condition after Auschwitz

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Hans Jonas ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Human Condition

The article endeavours to compare the reflections on the Shoah of two of the most celebrated intellectuals of Jewish origin of the 20th century, namely the German philosopher Hans Jonas (1903-1993) and the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964). Both Jonas’ essay on The Concept of God after Auschwitz (1987) and Grossman’s novels and reports, such as The Hell of Treblinka (1944), Life and Fate (1980), and The Sistine Madonna (1989), are characterised by a thorough enquiry into the ambivalence of the human condition, that tries to shed some light on the disturbing abyss of Auschwitz and the Shoah. Although neither Jonas nor Grossman considered themselves as religious believers, thanks to the Shoah they recollected their Jewish roots and developed peculiar and innovative thoughts on the meaning and vulnerability of life, human freedom, immortality, and God. The article endeavours to highlight the main similarities and differences between these two authors, who tackled the issue of thinking after Auschwitz.

To Fall from High or Low Estate? Tragedy and Social Class in Historical Perspective

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Hall
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
New City ◽  
City State ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Human Condition

In a famous essay, the agnostic bertrand russell hailed tragedy as the highest instantiation of human freedom. tragedy results from human beings' persistence in the conscious, imaginative representation of the plight of humanity in the inhumane universe. Tragedy “builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; … within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty” (53-54). Russell's “servile captains of tyrant Fate” are the instruments by which metaphysical compulsion tortures humans—Death and Pain and Despair. Man, instead of allowing himself to be terrorized as “the slave of Fate,” creates tragedy “to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life” (57). By transforming the human condition into tragic art, humans create their own world of resistance, in which they can be the truly free “burghers” of a dauntless new city-state of the mind.

Play and the Human Condition

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Henricks
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
Play Styles ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Human Condition

This book brings together ways of considering play to probe its essential relationship to work, ritual, and communitas. The book examines the causes, consequences, and contexts of play. Focusing on five contexts for play—the psyche, the human body, the environment, society, and culture—the book identifies conditions that instigate play, and comments on its implications for those settings. The book explores how we learn about ourselves and the world, and about the intersection of these two realms, through acts of play. Offering a general theory of play as behavior promoting self-realization, it articulates a conception of self that includes individual and social identity, particular and transcendent connection, and multiple fields of involvement. It also evaluates play styles from history and contemporary life to analyze the relationship between play and human freedom. The book shows how play allows us to learn about our qualities and those of the world around us—and in so doing make sense of ourselves.

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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