The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

The Ugly Psyche: Arendt and the Right to Opacity

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-198
Author(s):  
Anne O’Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Public Life ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Specific Question ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Sensus Communis ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract Arendt was famously dismissive of the work of psychologists, claiming that they did nothing more than reveal the pervasive ugliness and monotony of the psyche. If we want to know who people are, she argued, we should observe what they do and say rather than delving into the turmoil of their inner lives; if we want to understand humanity, we would be better off reading Oedipus Rex than hearing about someone’s Oedipus complex. The rejection has a certain coherence in the context of her understanding of public life as the realm of appearance and opinion, but examining it through the specific question of ugliness complicates that understanding. While beauty invites us to contemplate the world and admire it, ugliness repels our attention and sows the seed of a worry that the world might not want to be known. Working with Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, the Kant lectures and a striking Denktagebuch entry in which she reacts with revulsion to Matisse’s Heads of Jeannette, I argue that Arendt’s response to the ugly psyche requires a re-examination of the sensus communis. If the psyche does not want to be known, and if not all points of view are open to imaginative occupation, the ideal and practice of enlarged mentality must reckon with a right to opacity.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nora Goldschmidt ◽  
Barbara Graziosi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Site ◽  
Entire Volume ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Classical Poetry ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Made In

The Introduction sheds light on the reception of classical poetry by focusing on the materiality of the poets’ bodies and their tombs. It outlines four sets of issues, or commonplaces, that govern the organization of the entire volume. The first concerns the opposition between literature and material culture, the life of the mind vs the apprehensions of the body—which fails to acknowledge that poetry emerges from and is attended to by the mortal body. The second concerns the religious significance of the tomb and its location in a mythical landscape which is shaped, in part, by poetry. The third investigates the literary graveyard as a place where poets’ bodies and poetic corpora are collected. Finally, the alleged ‘tomb of Virgil’ provides a specific site where the major claims made in this volume can be most easily be tested.

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

Academe ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirley Brice Heath ◽  
Gerald Graff
Keyword(s):  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

The real banality of evil

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Regine Lamboy
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
The Real ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Adolf Eichmann ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The University

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his utter thoughtlessness. This raised the questins of whether there might be a connection between thinking and abstaining from evil doing, which she explored in her last book The Life of the Mind. If there is indeed such a connection, there may be a class of people who might be led to abstain from evil doing if they can be persuaded to engage in thinking. This dissertation examines Arendt's success in establishing such a connection. Overall, her project does not really succeed. Her overly formal analysis of thinking wavers between a highly abstract and obscure conceptualization of thinking and a more down to earth definition. Ultimately she winds up stripping thinking of all possible content. .

A Philosophical, Cultural, and Literary Critique of Mental Illness in Birago Diop’s “Sarzan”

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Adrien Pouille
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Nervous Breakdown ◽  
The Mind

This paper is another contribution to the long list of articles and book chapters written about Birago Diop's work, “Sarzan.” Unlike most if not all interpretations of the eponymous hero's mental illness, this article reads Sarzan's nervous breakdown as an invitation to services, which are radically different from the ones he is mandated by the French administration to perform, yet integral to the customs of his village. To many critics, the mental degradation witnessed in Sarzan, is an ancestral correction inflicted to Sarzan following his desacralization of rituals and sites sacred to his community. But however, legitimate this interpretation may be, it is quite limited in light of various forms of recuperative rituals practiced in traditional Africa to address and cure disturbances related to the mind.

scholarly journals Exercising Musical Minds: Phrenology and Music Pedagogy in London circa 1830

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
David Trippett
Keyword(s):  
Music Pedagogy ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Dynamical Nature ◽  
Loss Of Contact ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Cost

The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as paradigm and rallying cry, are here situated in the context of music pedagogy during the second quarter of the century, with particular reference to amateur musicians and the popular appeal of phrenological “exercise,” and of devices such as Johann Bernhard Logier's “chiroplast.”

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