Bodily Contemplation: On the Question of the Truth of the Perception of Physical Objects in Chinese Landscape Painting

This article analyzes the views of representatives of the scientific community on ancient Chinese landscape painting, emphasis is mainly placed on views that concern the spiritual qualities of landscape painting, as well as rethinking concepts that ignore the significance of sensual perception. Landscape painting is usually considered as a spiritual work of Taoism: landscape painting developed from Taoist thought, Taoist philosophy determined the identity of the artistic style and the inherent spirit of landscape painting. Moreover, some researchers even believe that bodily contemplation of landscape painting means setting the very original nature of mountains and waters, and the "knowledge of the truth" is a spiritual process that is more blocked by the human capacity for sensual perception. Some of the scientists completely deny the possibility and truth of sensual perception of physical objects in landscape painting. The author of this article believes that the spiritual component of landscape painting lurks precisely in the value of sensual perception, and bodily contemplation of mountains and waters is impossible without the participation of the body, clear confirmation of which we find in the ancient Chinese theory of arts. Ancient Chinese works of art traditionally had a close connection with sensual perception through bodily contemplation. This process is not simply about capturing object information, but when the subject takes an active part in the vision of the object, when the subject gives feedback to the object, and through acquiring the object its meaning is transmitted. Only through bodily contemplation, the individual can fully feel the artistic value of landscape painting, and Taoist philosophy thus gains a real existence in landscape painting, becoming a kind of emotional thinking.

A Transforming Path – The Pilgrims’ Songs

This article introduces the composition of the Pilgrim Psalms (120–134). Psalm 122 plays a key role in this. Jerusalem, the destination of the trip, will be a stop on the way. The pilgrimage to the place of faith becomes a path to the points of suffering in society. The background comes into view with Psalm 123, a psalm lacking an expression of trust, the low point of the entire trip. It begins the spiritual work that always occurs in places of faith: The language of power and the language of religion have become intermingled and perverted perceptions of God. Psalm 123 counteracts this misunderstanding of God by addressing God. In Psalm 123 the power and nature of prayer can be experienced intensely. Prayer is the discovery of God’s surrender to us humans and an act of freedom in relation to the existing balance of power.

The Effect of Workplace Spirituality on Employee Performance

Employees in the 21st century seek a work environment which allows them to find a sense of purpose at work, within an atmosphere filled with respect and courteous interactions between the employees and their surroundings. The spiritually-oriented work environment is crucial because it shapes employees’ behaviour at the personal level and eventually, improves employee performance. In this paper, a theoretical framework which explains how the spiritual work environment (inner self, community and meaningful work) improves employee performance is presented. This framework can be a reference for organisations in gauging their spiritual work environment, and subsequently incorporating spiritual elements at work as a way to influence employee performance. In return, it contributes to the long-term survival and success of the organisation.

Apathy And The Modern Self: The Afflictions Of Modernity And Orientation Toward The Good

Research to date on apathy has been limited to the technical spheres of politics, pedagogy, mass media, and business. Contrary to apathy’s characterization in recent scholarship, this work claims that apathy cannot be understood in terms of a decline in political engagement alone. Through a history of the idea of apathy beginning with the Stoic concept of apatheia, this work locates apathy in the epochal shift in epistemology and subjectivity which occurred between antiquity and modernity, and claims that apathy is a philosophical (rather than political) problem. Guiding research questions include: what allowed for the possibility of modern apathy, and what means might we have at our disposal to address apathy? Rather than treating symptoms, I argue that any response to apathy must engage with its epochal grounding conditions, and so rather than suggesting policy reforms or new legislation, I assess problems accompanying modern subjectivity and epistemology, and the place of the Good under modernity. This project also participates in the longstanding debate concerning the possibility of uniting sense and reason, a problem known in antiquity and addressed by communication theorists and Romantic poets. I argue that the commingling of sense and reason is another way of describing openness to an encounter with the Good, and under modernity such commingling might result from aesthetic exercises. I consider McLuhan and Foucault thinkers whose work can be read as a form of áskēsis that extends the ancient philosophical tradition into modernity in order to encourage spiritual work in the present. Through readings of McLuhan and Foucault’s engagement with antiquity, I then suggest that aesthetic exercises arising out of the modern milieu may offer a response to apathy and its grounding epistemological and subjective conditions. This work attempts to broaden the contemporary understanding of apathy, and to reconnect the discourse on apathy to its grounding conditions – subjective and epistemological sunderings which have been intensified and normalized under modernity. This broadening and reconnection demand that apathy is understood in a more complete way, not simply in terms of its immediate consequences for the technological society.

Apathy And The Modern Self: The Afflictions Of Modernity And Orientation Toward The Good

Research to date on apathy has been limited to the technical spheres of politics, pedagogy, mass media, and business. Contrary to apathy’s characterization in recent scholarship, this work claims that apathy cannot be understood in terms of a decline in political engagement alone. Through a history of the idea of apathy beginning with the Stoic concept of apatheia, this work locates apathy in the epochal shift in epistemology and subjectivity which occurred between antiquity and modernity, and claims that apathy is a philosophical (rather than political) problem. Guiding research questions include: what allowed for the possibility of modern apathy, and what means might we have at our disposal to address apathy? Rather than treating symptoms, I argue that any response to apathy must engage with its epochal grounding conditions, and so rather than suggesting policy reforms or new legislation, I assess problems accompanying modern subjectivity and epistemology, and the place of the Good under modernity. This project also participates in the longstanding debate concerning the possibility of uniting sense and reason, a problem known in antiquity and addressed by communication theorists and Romantic poets. I argue that the commingling of sense and reason is another way of describing openness to an encounter with the Good, and under modernity such commingling might result from aesthetic exercises. I consider McLuhan and Foucault thinkers whose work can be read as a form of áskēsis that extends the ancient philosophical tradition into modernity in order to encourage spiritual work in the present. Through readings of McLuhan and Foucault’s engagement with antiquity, I then suggest that aesthetic exercises arising out of the modern milieu may offer a response to apathy and its grounding epistemological and subjective conditions. This work attempts to broaden the contemporary understanding of apathy, and to reconnect the discourse on apathy to its grounding conditions – subjective and epistemological sunderings which have been intensified and normalized under modernity. This broadening and reconnection demand that apathy is understood in a more complete way, not simply in terms of its immediate consequences for the technological society.

The Pentecostal War Against Afro-Brazilian ‘Demons’ – Politics, Selfhood and Shared Experience of Spiritual Work in Southeast Brazil

This article discusses the religious conflict between Afro-Brazilian and Pentecostal groups shedding light on the complex relations between cross-religious experiences and the official acknowledgement of ‘religion’ in Brazil. The study analyses devotees and clients’ experiences in the rituals of Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus and Umbanda addressing fluid selfhoods and the multiple human and other-than-human agencies in the making of individual life trajectories through ritual participation. Thus, regarding religious conflict merely through bounded identities, institutions or dogma, the study shows that behind the fortifying religious conflict between Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religious groups relies a politically complex, colonially framed concept of ‘religion’ which leaves out of academic and political consideration a large part of effective ritual knowledge and agency, continuously re-producing the inferior position of ‘Afro-Brazilian religions’ within the Brazilian society. The analysis in this article is based on ethnographic field research carried out in Southeast Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during 2008-2015.

Bounded Religious Automation at Work: Communicating Human Authority in Artificial Intelligence Networks

Existential threats to human work and leadership have been expressed over intensifying human-machine communication, and the development of robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Yet popular texts and techno-centric approaches to AI assume a flat ontology in human-machine communication which obscures power relations governing new technologies, necessitating a bounded automation approach integrating socio-economic influences that shape AI diffusion in distinctive occupational settings. This article advances three critical lines of enquiry to interrogate abstract labor displacement propositions by contextualizing human authority and communication in spiritual work. By explicating the dynamic and relational ways in which clerics strategically manage emerging social robotics, discussion of the case of ‘the world’s first robot monk’ illustrates how organizational leaders can influence AI agents to (re)produce values and cultural realities. In the process, priests strengthen normative regulation of power by aligning epistemic knowledge shared about AI and during human-machine communication to extant understandings of collective ideals.

THE CASUS OF STRUCTURALISM

The history of structuralism, it would seem, should be a story about pure mathematics, and here the dream of modern knowledge about “hard methodological canons” free of uncertainty should just find itself. But in fact, it is the history of structuralism – this is the story of something opposite. About doubts, about searches, about “longing” – that which accompanies all serious spiritual work. And serious spiritual work comes from serious life. Structuralism comes from an extremely extreme immersion in the seriousness of life. And also from the experience of comprehension of this immersion. So in the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of structuralism, a place is found for German romanticism and Russian ro-mance, for German philosophy and Russian literary riticism.