Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed the need to be genuinely understood. This need is manifest in the precision with which he describes in his Confessions the kinesthetic valence of his emotional experiences and the impact kinesic dialogues had on him. Several of the kinesic dialogues he records in his autobiography revolve around surprising shifts in tonicity, tone, and tempo in verbal utterances, gestures, and the vital action of breathing. This chapter considers four such passages, including a scene of writing in which Rousseau’s emotional state is specifically communicated by the very fact that his handwriting is unreadable owing to the trembling of his hand.

Commoning Against the Corona Crisis

The Covid-19 crisis has highlighted the ‘precarity’ of human life in general, and particularly that of certain groups in society. It has debunked the myth of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual, and shows the extent to which we always already live ‘in common’, thereby also emphasizing the necessity of commons (of care, nurture, and economic resources). This research explores what role commons, as an antidote to precarity and a form of resistance against governmental precarization, can play in the current situation. We start by analyzing the relationship between precarity and commons in light of the Covid-19 crisis. On the basis of participant observation in Naples (Italy) we will describe the commoning activities during the pandemic, their governmental invisibilization, and the way in which they could be institutionally recognized as a vital action of care and solidarity, also beyond the emergency. Finally, in the last part, we draw on the work of Roberto Esposito, and his use of the terms community and immunity, arguing that precisely because of the impossibility of fully immunizing ourselves from the virus (and from each other) we have to consider ourselves as part of a community, bound not by shared properties but by a shared obligation.

Confucian Ethics in Modernity: Ontologically Rooted, Internationally Resposive, and Integratively Systematic

This article, from my onto-generative and onto-hermeneutic theories, will explore how Confucian virtue ethics could be modernized and globalized by answering challenges of civic duties, human rights, policy planning and decision-making regarding social and communal development with considerations of maximal sustainable goodness or benefits to both individual and groups. In doing so, we come to recognize the multifunctional potency of Confucian virtues in meeting modern and postmodern needs and demands in a complicated global-local environment, and see how this development of civic and other kinds of virtues form a unifying foundation for the justification, discovery and sustainable source of insights and motivations for vital action.