7,837 research outputs found
Towards moral and authentic generalization : humanity, individual human beings and distortion
No full textThe article treats the issue of generality. How may one conceive of the relationship between the uniqueness of individuality and the commonality of the human (species and society) without reduction? Can generalization be made moral – es-chewing stereotypes in society – and can it be made authentic – enacting a human science which treats the individual as a thing-in-itself? Simmel’s seminal inter-vention was to see generality as a necessary kind of distortion. In contrast, this article offers rational models of the one and the whole which expect to retain the uniqueness of the one; and it suggests characteristics of human embodiment (ca-pacities, potentialities) that speak to individuality and generality at the same time. The article ends with a reconsideration of distortion as a humane artistic represen-tation, by way of the work of Stanley Spencer.Peer reviewe
Section II:introduction
No full textThis chapter is an introduction to Section II of the handbook, its main connecting themes and its individual contributions. How does the individual experience the external domains of society and culture? What is the nature of power in this relationship? There is the structural power by which a sociocultural environment endeavours to define and categorise, channel and contain individual life, but there is also the existential power whereby a free-ranging, authorial intellect defines its own objectives, and projects these into and as the world, without being subject to, determined by, external circumstance. While social structures may aim and claim to constrain, even mould, individual expression, nevertheless individual consciousness remains a manifestation of uniqueness and a means of transcendence
Internal conversation:interiority and individuality
No full textThis chapter argues that to apprehend processes of social interaction, their course and content call conceptually for an appreciation of individual interiority: the stream of consciousness and internal conversation—the worldviews and life-projects—of the individual actors concerned. ‘The secrecy of subjectivity’, according to Emmanuel Levinas, was the foundational precept not only of a moral philosophy but also of any vision of ethical social relations; a liberal or free society must ‘render justice to that secrecy which for each human being is his life’. Recognising human interiority, a subjectivity that is individual and personal is fundamental to an authentic human science, however, secret that subjectivity may substantively remain. Human internal conversation originates within the individual self and remains individual in character; it is idiosyncratic in the meanings it allocates to specific symbolic, social and cultural forms, and it is self-directed, imbued with ‘selfish’ purpose. In dialogue with himself or herself, the individual expresses a stream of private meaning and value, of private style and intent, which transcend sociocultural anchoring. While it may be impossible to access the substance of individual interiority, it is important to recognise its capacities; also its consequentiality
Voice, History, and Vertigo: Doing justice to dead voices through imaginative conversation
No full textRecording of presentation given at Vital Signs 2 Conference, 7-9 September 2010, University of Manchester
The world ages and in doing so the lost histories multiply. While one cannot presume to share the past of another, according to the German-British writer W.G.Sebald -- it is, indeed, morally compromising to appropriate, for instance, the tragic memory of past suffering-- still, voices seem to call out to the present even from the inamimate detritus of past lives. To consider the historical void of extinguished life is thus to risk 'vertigo' (as Sebald titled one of his works).
Voice, history and vertigo comprise my theme. If the stuff of history is the countless actual doings of countless individuals, and if an account is true or false in proportion to its representing or misrepresenting the individual doings -- 'an ideal written histoy would tell the whole story of everything that ever happened to every human being' (A. M. MacIver)-- how is human science to do justice to individual lives that lapse constantly into historical oblivion?
My hope is to take advantage of the paradoxical nature of voice and also to exploit an idea aptly expressed by G.K. Chesterton that 'imagination has its highest use in a retrospective realization. The trumpet of imagination (...) calls the dead out of their graves.' One does justice to dead voices by imagining them into conversation
General introduction:<i>The Routledge handbook of existential human science</i>
No full textExistentialism is a well-known and historically delimited intellectual movement that includes a recognisable group of mid-twentieth-century figures, including Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, De Beauvoir, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty amongst others, drawing on nineteenth-century forerunners such as Kierkegaard, Emerson and Nietzsche. These are undoubtedly touchstones for thinking about what an existential enquiry consists in. For the editors of this volume, though, existential enquiry engages a theme that is narrower and more universal. This might be framed as a question: How to understand the irreducible living breathing human individual who is both a subject and an object in its own world, and whose life cannot be replaced with the lives of the other human beings around it? Existential enquiry begins, then, at the point when it reasserts a truth about life as any actually existing person experiences it; that, whatever shape subjectivity may take in its social networks, or in cultural discourse viewed from outside, each life is and remains distinct to itself, unique, finite and irreplaceable. If, then, existential enquiry is, or should be, a ‘tale of the richness of being versus abstraction’ what kind of language of observation and analysis does the enquirer need to tell it? The editors review the options.</p
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