Charity and grace

This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself.

Convictions and self-deception: attention and the fundamental vulnerability

The present study focuses on the anthropological factors that constitute a kind of specifically human vulnerability. This typically human fragility can be expressed in many different ways that have something in common with fallibility, faultiness, which consists in an oscillation between greatness and finitude. As far as vulnerability itself is concerned, it means a susceptibility to being easily affected, an exposure to injury. Insofar as I speak, in the rest of this research, of the phenomenon of self-deception, it is a question, in the case being investigated, of making injury to oneself. In order to understand how it is possible to wound oneself in the analysed sense, it seems necessary to refer to some kind of maintaining a rupture, of an inconsistency within a set of convictions that one forms about oneself, other people, and the world. My investigation below is divided into four parts. First, I describe analytically, and from a rather epistemological perspective, the essential components that define the phenomenon of self-deception. To do so, I will rely mainly on Donald Davidson's well-known text Deception and Division. Secondly, I briefly review the more important solutions that have been proposed to deal with the difficulty in question. These proposals can be classified into two groups: the first contains the solutions that consider the conflicting beliefs in terms of their intentionality; the second group of solutions, on the contrary, includes the non-intentional solutions. The brief examination of them shows that the most philosophically promising views bear the mark of an insurmountable weakness and therefore require new approaches. Thirdly, I propose to take up some of the achievements of Paul Ricoeur's thought and I justify my choice. In addition, I try to establish a link between the problem of self-deception and the Ricoeurian theme of attention. Fourthly and finally, starting from the Ricoeurian phenomenology of attention, I present a possible understanding of self-deception that would keep both the intentionality of the opposing convictions (and thus the philosophical scope of the problem) and its rootedness in a real human experience (and thus a concrete, less abstract character of the approach than the one referring to mathematical models). As a result, the study offers a new understanding of vulnerability as a constituent of the human condition.

Art as a Vehicle for Compassion

I address the range of human experience and emotion in watercolor paintings. Watercolor, much like emotions, is unpredictable and requires special care to harness its infinitely varied and nuanced complexities. Creating such works requires forgiveness in how water and pigment interact, as well as the physical manifestation of subjective experience. These emotional paintings express topics ranging from gender and cultural identity, to mundane life experience. Vulnerability and empathy are required to portray hardship and loss in a manner that honors humanity’s lived experience. Working beyond the boundaries codified by narrative realism, this work seeks to offer a glimpse into the realm of the unknown. My primary themes focus on aspirations, secrets, and dreamlike qualities. For this reason, I call my work ethereal realism. These fleeting moments of inspiration, while difficult to grasp and attuned to distant memories, are fortified through an improvisational painting process. Using subtle symbolism in relation to nature and soft feminine figures, I invite the audience into an alternate space where trauma can be healed, and compassion takes hold. The paintings also make use of negative space, so that viewers can insert themselves in the paintings and infer what might lie beyond humanity. This work does not merely paint a picture of melancholy but opens a window to the divine.

Naturalism

This chapter argues that naturalism is a virtue in an account of human experience, and thus desideratum in any ethical theory, and that Buddhist ethics is indeed naturalistic. In particular, its ethical orientation relies on no transcendent or transcendental concerns; its theory of the good is rooted in an account of human nature and the nature of the natural world, and its account of agency and responsibility is thoroughly causal. The chapter also discusses some of the aspects and implications of karma, including karmic fruition, the ways that our future lives are conditioned by our present ones, and the idea of collective karma.

Introduction

The introduction examines three major theories of humor: superiority theory, incongruity theory, and release theory. Considering these models with the work of feminist and anti-racist scholars in mind, we see that each is also a theory of what it means to be human, carrying ethical and political implications far beyond any immediate analysis of joking. While incongruity theory is probably the best model from which to approach the poets discussed in this book, no one theory satisfactorily describes their work, and certainly not the human experience of laughter as a whole. A better approach may be to draw on theories of empathy, which many philosophers see as opposed to laughter, to define a new category: “constructive humor.” This form of laughter promotes mutual understanding among joker, listener, and the target of the joke.

The rise and fall of rationality in language

The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

Violent Memory: Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Modern information technologies have radically transfigured human experience. The extensive use of mnemonic devices, for instance, has redefined the subject by externalizing aspects of inner consciousness. These transformations involve the incorporeal but deeply felt, violent dislocations of human experience, traumas that are grounded in reality but which challenge symbolic resources because they are difficult to articulate. I am interested in how the unseen wounding of mnemonic intervention is registered in the “impossible” language of speculative fiction (SF). SF is both rooted in the “real” and “estranged” from reality, and thus able to give form to impossible injuries. This paper argues that Haruki Murakami uses the mode of SF in his novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, to explore how mnemonic substitutes interfere with the complex process of remembering World War II in Japan. I will demonstrate how, through SF, Murakami is able to give form to an unseen crisis of memory in postwar Japan, a crisis marked by the unspeakable shock of war and by the trauma that results from the intrusion of artificial memories upon one’s consciousness of history.