Self-realization

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Evans
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
Real Nature ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual

‘Self-realization’ is the development and expression of characteristic attributes and potentials in a fashion which comprehensively discloses their subject’s real nature. Usually, the ‘self’ in question is the individual person, but the concept has also been applied to corporate bodies held to possess a unitary identity. What constitutes the self’s ‘real nature’ is the key variable generating the many conceptions of self-realization. These can be grouped broadly into two types: (1) the ‘collectivist’, in which the self-realizing lifestyle, being either the same for all or specific to a person or subgroup of people, is ultimately definable only in the context, and perhaps with reference to the common purposes, of a collective social body; (2) the ‘individualist’, in which a person’s self-realization has no necessary connection with the ends of a particular community. As an ethic, self-realization can be proposed as the means to achieve a life identified as good by some criterion independent of the self-realizing process, or held to be that which actually defines the good. Its critics typically argue that human nature is such that any equation of ‘self-realization’ and ‘goodness’ is implausible or undesirable.

The Many-Minded Man

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel P. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Therapeutic Model

This book explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences — both ancient and modern — a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, the book addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, the book reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.

Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Self-Concept of Russians and Indigenous Peoples of Yakutia

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
N.D. Eliseeva ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Concept ◽  
Contact Points ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Cross Cultural Analysis

The article presents the results of a cross-cultural Self-concept study of the peoples living in Yakutia. The research is carried out in line with the social psychology of the individual. The author is interested in the self-perception of the individual in terms of cultural and ethnic diversity. The study was conducted in a multi-ethnic region - the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The article presents the results of cross-cultural analysis of Russian and indigenous peoples of Yakutia. The hypothesis is tested that the common history and living conditions determine the formation of common contact points at the personal level. Here the author perceives the personality from the point of view of L. S. Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach, according to which the personality is a product of cultural-historical development. The study sample consists of 697 people from 12 to 79 years (479 women and 218 men). Of these, 111 are Russians, and 586 are representatives of the indigenous peoples of Yakutia. The method of research is the "Who Am I?" method of M. Kuhn and T. MсPartland. Taking into account the specifics of the research object, the author added two categories of Self-concept, such as racial identity and identity with the natural world. The results of the study were processed using statistical Mann-Whitney criteria, student t-criteria, content analysis, and ranking. The study was conducted throughout Yakutia. The instructions were presented in Russian and Yakut. The study revealed that the Self concept of the Russian and indigenous peoples of Yakutia have both common and different features. Common characteristics are a high level of reflec-tion, statistically significant similarity of important Self concept characteristics: reflexive Self, emotional Self, communicative Self, and the lack of regional identity in both groups. The common most frequently mentioned characteristics are the following: hardworking, kind, smart, cheerful, purposeful, hardy, and sociable. The distinctive features of Self concept reflect the uniqueness of the national character of the compared peoples. For Russians, this is largesse and sincerity. For indigenous peoples, honesty, pitying, and modesty are used for psycholinguistic analysis of the meaning of words. Honesty is also perceived as straightfor-wardness, modesty as a manifestation of emotions and actions of a person in moderation. It was also revealed that the family identity of indigenous peoples is more significant in the Self concept than in Russians. The conclusion is made about the importance of having both common and unique features for multi ethnic Russia.

Scale as a Force of Deconstruction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Clark
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
Numerical Scale ◽  
Human Individual ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Default Assumption

What has recently been proposed as ‘scale critique,’ viz., the elucidation of under-examined assumptions about scale in many areas of intellectual and political life, can be forcefully reconceptualised as a mode of deconstruction. A certain spatial, temporal, or numerical scale, often unacknowledged, is a constitutive feature of all temporalization. A phenomenon or a conception that may appear, variously, as morally or cognitively self-evident at one scale may be uncovered as far less evident, unitary, or resolved at another. The second half of this paper puts a scalar deconstruction into practice by uncovering the very different conceptions of the ‘human nature’ that arise from changing the scale of consideration from that of the individual person, the default assumption in most thinkers, including Derrida, to that of humanity as an entity taken at a far larger, ‘global’ scale, an ‘agent’ without the features usually taken to define the human individual, such as rational self-consciousness. This larger scale, with all its counter-intuitive implications, is becoming an increasingly unavoidable, if discordant element of all thinking in environmental and other politics.

“A TAX ON THE MANY, TO ENRICH A FEW”: JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY VS. THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-289
Author(s):  
William S. Belko
Keyword(s):  
Majority Rule ◽  
The United States ◽  
Andrew Jackson ◽  
The Core ◽  
Protective System ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Jacksonian Democracy ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual

The core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy—equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual—have long been defined almost exclusively by the Bank War, which commenced in earnest with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Yet, this same rhetoric proved far more pervasive and consistent when one considers the ardent opposition to the protective system. Opponents of the protective tariff, commencing with the Tariff of 1816 and continuing unabated to the Walker Tariff of 1846, thus contributed directly to the development of Jacksonian Democracy, and, by introducing and continually employing this language, gave to the tariff debates in the United States a unique angle that differed from the debates in Europe.

scholarly journals Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 57-73
Author(s):  
J. Marianne Siegmund ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
World History ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
Final Remark ◽  
Saint John ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Individual

In Pope Saint John XXIII’s Encyclical Mater et Magistra (May 15, 1961), the Holy Father sought to apply the Church’s social doctrine to numerous situations of the times, among them the issue of the common good. This paper first anchors the encyclical within the larger frame of world history at the time in which it was written, and then offers a brief overview of Mater et Magistra. In light of two specific themes in the encyclical, the individual person and socialization, a final remark highlights the notion of the common good.

scholarly journals The Rule of St. Benedict and Modern Liberal Authority

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84
Author(s):  
Linda Zagzebski
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
First Order ◽  
Authority Structure ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual

In this paper I examine the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict, and argue that the authority structure of Benedictine communities as described in that document satisfies well-known principles of authority defended by Joseph Raz. This should lead us to doubt the common assumption that pre-modern models of authority violate the modern ideal of the autonomy of the self. I suggest that what distinguishes modern liberal authority from Benedictine authority is not the principles that justify it, but rather the first order beliefs for the sake of which authority is sought by the individual, and the degree of trust between the authority and the subject. 

scholarly journals Of Vessels, Conduits and Instruments: Reflections from the Bodies as Media Working Group

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-115
Author(s):  
Nelesi Rodríguez ◽  
Eugenia Manwelyan
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Community Of Learning ◽  
Working Together ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual

In the fall of 2016, a group of artists and educators met regularly over the course of three months to explore the many ways in which the human body mediates experience and knowledge. In their time working together, the Bodies as Media Working Group (BaM) explored the ways in which the (human) body comes to know, understand, and communicate ancestry, memory, ecology, emotionality, creativity, and even death. This working group was created as part of the School of Apocalypse (SoA), a NYC-based community of learning that examines connections between creative practice and survival.  The BaM working group encapsulated its learning process by designing and producing a resource in the form of a deck of cards containing instructions and prompts meant to be activated as a ritual that aims to “turn on” people’s body awareness and to prepare their bodies to learn. In designing a pedagogical tool for the body, BaM aims to reconstitute the individual and social body contained most commonly in the classroom as open, trusting, and alert. The tool thereby redesigns the space within which learning takes place without making any physical alterations to it, but rather by reconfiguring the group’s relationship to it and within it.

The Cunning of Reason in Hegel and Marx

1956 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
World History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Individual Person ◽  
Mode Of Life ◽  
Will Self ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

According to Hegel, universal history is the realization of the Idea of Reason in a succession of National Spirits. These are manifested in the deeds of heroes, or world-historical individuals, such as Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon. However, the Idea of Reason does not work itself out in history in a manner which would seem reasonable on the surface. It is not actualized in this or that of its stages as a consequence of men consciously adopting it as their ideal and striving to translate it into reality through their mode of life and conduct. It is not, as it were, through the imitation of Reason that Reason is realized in history. How, then, does this take place?Hegel's answer to this question is contained in his doctrine of the Cunning of Reason. Briefly, he holds that history fulfills its ulterior rational designs in an indirect and sly manner. It does so by calling into play the irrational element in human nature, the passions. So Hegel writes: “Two elements, therefore, enter into our investigation: first, the Idea, secondly, the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast tapestry of world history.” By “passion” he means those all-consuming emotions of the individual person which are self-regarding in nature. In discussing the question, he writes: “I mean here nothing more than human activity resulting from private interest, from special or, if you will, self-seeking designs—with this qualification: that the whole energy of will and character is devoted to the attainment of one aim and that other interests or possible aims, indeed everything else, is sacrificed to this aim.”

The Root of Immortality: Death in the Context of Jewish Wisdom

1978 ◽  
Vol 71 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 177-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Peter Berger ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sacred Canopy ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
Human Enterprise

In his influential studyThe Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger asserted that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death or, more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.” Berger was not suggesting that religion is primarily a private obsession of the individual with death. Rather his thesis is that religion is a social phenomenon, part of the human enterprise of “world-building” by which we attempt “to impose a meaningful order upon reality.” The significance of death is not an individual matter because “death radically challengesallsocially objectivated definitions of reality—of the world, of others, and of the self. Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, ‘business-as-usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here everything in the daytime world of existence in society is massively threatened with ‘irreality’—that is, everything in that world becomes dubious, eventually unreal, other than what one used to think.” In short, death is a threat to the meaningfulness not only of the individual life, but of the common enterprise of society and, indeed, of any attempt, social, religious or philosophical, to perceive reality as a coherent and purposeful order.

scholarly journals The Power of the Periphery: Reassessing Spatial Metaphors in the Ideological Positioning of the Translator

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Liz Medendorp
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ideological Position ◽  
Spatial Metaphors ◽  
Systemic Level ◽  
The Common ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Word Translation ◽  
Material Transportation ◽  
The Individual

Positionality in translation is often framed in terms of spatial metaphors, using such concepts as the “periphery,” the “in between,” and the “borderlands,” among many others. Given that the Latin root for the word “translation,” 'translatio,' means “to carry across,” this tendency to think of the translator’s position in the concrete terms of travel through physical space is not surprising. However, because the movement of information and ideas no longer requires material transportation, it may no longer be theoretically useful to approach positionality in such concrete terms, and thus a reassessment and re-contextualization of these spatial metaphors is needed. Moreover, the sociological turn’s growing awareness of the translator’s contextual embeddedness reinforces the need to re-conceptualize positionality, shifting away from notions of physical space and toward an ideological construct. Indeed, upon closer examination, these spatial metaphors often prove problematic in several ways, not the least of which being the common undertone of peripherality that readily associates translation with marginality and subjugation. This article analyzes some of the spatial metaphors commonly used in translation scholarship in order to interrogate what they can contribute to a reformulation of the translator’s position in ideological rather than spatial terms. Turning to systems theory for a more nuanced and applicable take on peripherality and centrality, translation is removed from the subordinate position associated with physical notions of the periphery and shifted instead to an ideological position as an agent of inter- and intrasystemic transfer. The translator navigates the systemic periphery, a dynamic, fluid space of intersystemic overlap and interaction, but does not remain there. The translator’s position is therefore both a shifting and powerful one, as translating the peripheral experience of confronting otherness into the centre results in the need to reformulate the Self, for the individual as well as potentially on a larger, systemic level.

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