The article aims to offer a few hypotheses on an analysis of the phenomenology of moral action in Nietzsche, especially in relation to Nietzsche’s formula “become who you are”, through two crucial concepts to the creation of man by the action: experience (Erlebnis) and ‘cultivation’. Man becomes what he is only in life and under the concrete conditions of his existence, without the remote suspicion of, as Nietzsche wrote, “what he is” and in this case, it is a (...) process that unfolds through his experiences. Understood as pathos or counter-concept of reason, experience acts cultivating the man in a phenomenological process of human ‘cultivation’ toward ‘becoming what one is’. (shrink)

Zen teachings--infused with elements of memoir--by a popular modern teacher who "grew up" at the feet of two of the great figures who brought Zen to America, Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri. He employs his reminiscences of those two great masters as teaching anecdotes. Tim Burkett was twenty when he met Suzuki Roshi, and it was love at first sight. He immediately quit pursuing the career in law to which his illustrious family of jurists inclined him, and became a serious (...) Zen student. He went on to become a licensed psychotherapist and then followed Katagiri Roshi to Minneapolis to become a founder of the Zen scene there. He never left. Now that he's himself a revered Zen teacher, he's decided to articulate his own view of Zen. He structures the teaching according to five not-necessarily sequential levels on the road to enlightenment: (1) commitment to the path, (2) studying the self, (3) cultivating compassion and equanimity, (4) perseverance, and (5) emptiness. This is an introduction to Zen teaching that reads like an intriguing memoir, as the author discovers the teaching in the people, places, and experiences he encounters in the course of his practice. (shrink)

In GS, Nietzsche utters for the first time the paradoxical formula that sums up a good deal of his ethical thought: "What does your conscience say?—'You should become who you are'".1 The paradox, of course, lies in the odd juxtaposition of becoming and being: how can one become what one already is? Nietzsche repeats the formula toward the end of the original edition of GS, connecting it explicitly to the idea of self-creation: "We, however, want to become who we are—human (...) beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!". What exactly such self-creation involves for Nietzsche, how it relates to "who we are," and whether it ultimately coheres as a... (shrink)

How the journey began -- Enduring companions -- The last man -- The eternal return -- Zarathustra in love -- The mountaintop -- On genealogy -- Decadence and disgust -- The abysmal hotel -- The horse -- Behold, the man -- Becoming who you are -- Morganstreich.

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

While social-emotional learning as a specific education concept originated from North America, the thoughts on emotions and associated pedagogical practices have developed across cultures. Drawing on Confucian and Daoist perspectives, this paper aims to reconfigure an alternative of social-emotional learning, beyond the dominant framework rooted in Western liberalism. It argues that the Confucian and Daoist notions of self are ontologically interrelated and in this interrelatedness the uniqueness of all things is constructed and embedded, which expects one to be authentic and (...) appropriate in her/his emotional interactions with others. As elucidated by three selected pedagogical examples, the proposed alternative of social-emotional learning can be elaborated as cultivating a sense of interrelatedness which nurtures one’s unique emotional bonds with others and enabling one to authentically experience the emotional interrelatedness and appropriately respond to the fulfillment of others’ emotional life. This alternative may also inspire us to go beyond the social-focus as indicated in the current concept and achieve social-ecological wellbeing and harmonization, echoing many other indigenous worldviews. (shrink)

Organic farming is spreading throughout Asia, including in Thailand. Little is known about whether farmers’ values change as they make the shift from conventional farming to organic farming. The benefits farmers perceive from making the shift have also scarcely been studied. We investigated these factors in Northeastern Thailand by conducting observations, key informant interviews, semi-structured interviews and questionnaire interviews. We found that as Thai farmers adopted organic methods, they developed an eco-consciousness. In comparing members of a Buddhist temple-based organic farmer (...) support group with members of a non-profit organic agriculture support group, we found that the temple-based group adopted deeper Buddhist eco-spiritual values while the non-profit group remained more commercially oriented. Farmers who adopted Buddhist eco-spiritual values enjoyed greater financial and health benefits from making the organic shift. A higher proportion of the temple-based group eliminated their debts after making the shift . Additionally, a higher proportion of members in the temple-based group felt that their physical health improved after becoming an organic farmer . Interestingly, the less debt farmers carried, the healthier they felt . Participants believed that eliminating the use of agro-chemicals, using organic fertilizers, consuming organic food, and increasing biodiversity on their farms also contributed to improving their health. We conclude that for Thai farmers who are devoutly committed to Buddhism, temple-based organic support programs provided an effective pathway to improving their finances, health and well-being. For Thai farmers generally, a fundamental adoption of eco-conscious values is integral to experiencing deeper non-commercial benefits from organic farming. Findings suggest that the expansion of organic farming systems depends on changing perspectives about well-being. (shrink)

It has been said that human dignity is a vacuous concept that should, therefore, be dismissed as an ethical category. This article seeks to defend the concept of human dignity by suggesting, first, that the flaw in the logic of those who claim that human dignity is a vacuous concept lies in an unjustifiable reductionism that results from the hermeneutic of suspicion that such authors apply to the concept. Second, that human dignity is not an either/or concept, as these authors (...) would suggest, but rather a both/and concept in which the contradictions that they would use for its dismissal are indeed where human dignity’s value as an ethical category lies. This is achieved by applying both a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of generosity to a reading of Gaudium et Spes. The result is a heuristic of human dignity in which dignity is shown to be something that all human beings all already have and, at the same time, still seek to acquire through morally good behaviour. The Component Dimensions of Dignity model addresses this tension in various aspects of the human condition: existential, behavioural, cognitive, and social. In so doing it provides a heuristic tool that can serve both a descriptive and a normative function in ethical discourse, because it can help us to see not only why people may engage in a particular course of action but also the extent to which this action really meets the proviso of the social component dimension of the model, namely, that my dignity is only ever fulfilled if the dignity of all others is brought to fulfilment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cultivating the PossibleKseniya Fiaduta Prokharchyk and Luciana Dantas de PaulaReimagining Education and Society / 3rd International Conference of Possibility Studies, All Hallows Campus, Dublin City University, Dublin, 07 17–21, 2023[End Page 290]Since its inaugural conference in May 2021, the Possibility Studies Network (PSN) has emerged as a vibrant space of hope, inspiring scholars, and practitioners around the globe to revive, (re)discover, and (re)imagine a central dimension of human existence: (...) the possible. Following the success of the first two conferences online, in 2023 the network organized its first fully inperson event on the theme of Cultivating the Possible: Reimagining Education and Society. Hosted by the School of Psychology at Dublin City University, in partnership with Creative Ireland, the latest conference brought together more than 150 participants from over twenty-five countries with the aim of "advancing the theoretical and practical understanding of how individuals and collectives become aware of and explore possibilities in the realm of the psychological, material, technological, social, cultural and political." 1In his inaugural keynote speech, Vlad Glăveanu (Dublin City University), the founder and president of PSN, outlined five key questions for the emergent, transdisciplinary field of possibility studies: (1) what kinds of psychological, social, material, technological and cultural resources and processes enable our engagement with the possible?; (2) how do individual differences, environmental contexts, and situational factors "collaborate" in shaping experiences of the possible?; (3) what is the relation between individual, group, community, and societal forms of becoming aware of and exploring possibilities?; (4) how do power relations structure our imagination of the possible, and with what consequences for how self and society are constituted?; and [End Page 291](5) what is our guide for deciding which possibilities to enact and which to reject, which possibilities are valuable, and which are harmful?These questions guided the conference experience, while still leaving space for other challenging questions to emerge. The five days of engaging discussions were due to not only the diversity in themes but also the variety of formats for presentations, workshops, and debates. The first three days of the conference were organized around keynote speeches by global scholars, who represented a wide range of disciplines from cognitive psychology to creative writing. The keynotes were followed by paper presentations and symposia—as well as "Principles of Circus" workshops by the National Circus School of Montréal, 2—and presentations from Creative Ireland. Finally, the last two days of the conference featured a debate between Michael Hanchett Hanson (Columbia University) and Giovanni Corazza (University of Bologna) on the status of "the real" in possibility studies, interactive workshops, 3the presentation of possibility hubs, and ample networking opportunities.The ethos of the conference was explicitly multidisciplinary, featuring contributions from many possibility-related fields, including creativity, imagination, serendipity, utopias/dystopias, psychology, futures studies, education, philosophy, ethics, literary and narrative studies, queer and (trans)gender studies, health and well-being research, environmental studies, and the arts, among other disciplines. While some of these fields count on their own rich and long-standing traditions of reflections on the possible, the conference provided a unique space where diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives could engage, nurture, and challenge each other in open, dialogic, and transdisciplinary encounters.As highlighted by the conference co-organizer Wendy Ross (London Metropolitan University) in her keynote lecture "Cultivating the Possible," such genuine interdisciplinary encounters represent an opportunity to push ourselves beyond the limits of our disciplines, to develop more comprehensive theoretical frameworks and methodologies, and to formulate new questions, advancing the study of possibility in exciting new directions. Given the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of the possible, this inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary ethos lies at the very heart of PSN's annual conferences. Moreover, the polyphonic nature of the event was anchored by a set of common themes and questions that held diverse voices and disciplinary perspectives in both collaborative harmony and reciprocal tension. [End Page 292]Pedagogies of the Possible I: Educating in a VUCA WorldMany papers explored the connections between possibility studies, education, and pedagogy in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). 4Most contributions emphasized the urgency of reimagining traditional educational systems... (shrink)

According to a traditional Cartesian view of the mind, you have a privileged access to your own conscious experiences that nobody else can have. Therefore, you have more authority than anybody else on your own experiences. Perceptual experiences are selfintimating: you are aware of what you are consciously perceiving. If you report seeing a pink elephant, nobody is entitled to deny it. There may be no pink elephant, but you do have the conscious experience of such elephant. However, the (...) progress in brain imaging might lead to the possibility that the scientist knows as well as you – or even better than you – what you are seeing, and even what you are hallucinating. What was only a thought experiment fourty years ago has become reality. Does brain reading challenge the privacy of the mind? Who has the most authority on your mind in case of conflict? You or the brain scientist? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:News and ViewsMark Gonnerman Click for larger view View full resolutionWhen I think of Roger Corless, I think of the bristlecone pine trees in the White Mountains of east-central California, about an hour's drive from Bishop up White Mountain Road. These trees (Pinus longaeva) are the world's oldest living beings. The senior member of the stand in Patriarch Grove, named Methuselah, is more than 4,700 years old.It is not (...) because Roger lived an especially long life—he was granted only sixty-nine-and-a-half years of calendar time—that he and these trees fuse in my mind. While Roger was an old soul from an older world, this association arises from Roger's adherence to the kind of "become who you are" eccentricity celebrated by Henry David Thoreau and other sages who remind each of us to "step to the music" of "a different drummer."When visiting the bristlecones, one is impressed by the various odd poses struck by each tree. Of course no two are alike; each holds a unique gnarly stance that says, "You are among a community of nonconformists." These trees remind us that each being is a unique expression of Nature and ought to be honored as such.Thoreau does not use the word "eccentric" in Walden, but writes of extravagance instead:I fear chiefly lest my expression not be extra- vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! [End Page 155] it depends on how you are yarded.... I desire to speak somewhat without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments.A lover of words, as was Roger, Thoreau splits extravagance in two to highlight its root meaning: "to wander" (vagari) "outside" (extra). To learn the truth of matters requires the courage to follow one's own path, even when—especially when—it takes one beyond the pale. Only then might wanderers become convinced of those truths they know, for they have been encountered firsthand and tested, experimentally, in the realm of personal experience.When one sets about the challenging work of claiming a natural right to eccentricity, one discovers self-authenticating feedback loops that encourage further steps along an always unfolding, yet untrammeled path. It takes courage to stay in motion, for the way is often rough. People get lost—and found. One's own authentic way leads to wakefulness. This in turn enables recognition and enjoyment of other liberated beings and compassion for those who have yet to hear chanticleer crow (to stay with Thoreau) or the lion's roar (as Buddhists might say).As Mas Kodani, a Jodoshinshu minister in South-Central Los Angeles has observed, "One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks a path comes into being." This walk requires a balance of both confident perseverance and an ability to respond to ever-changing conditions. Lives of both the bristlecones and Roger demonstrate perseverance in spite of hostile habitats: the pines, rooted in sandstone and dolomite, hang on in a cold and dry climate at 11,200 feet; Roger made his way with difficulty in spite of challenges he faced as a gay, Buddhist-and-Christian intellectual in Durham County, North Carolina. When, after thirty years, Roger became an emeritus professor at Duke and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, he found himself in a much more hospitable setting.It may seem strange to draw out this comparison of Roger and those ancient White Mountain pines, but when I first met those trees in the summer of 1998, they set a standard for authenticity that came to mind whenever Roger and I interacted. His extravagant accomplishments as a teacher, scholar, and person who lived a life of genuine service to others were attained through the real work of daily spiritual practice, critical reflection, and adherence to the truths—always plural for Roger—of which he had been convinced. I'll always be grateful for his inspiring example of a human life well lived. It... (shrink)

Even though depression has become one of the most common diseases in the world and significantly worsens the quality of life, many people who encounter its symptoms do not seek professional help and remain without treatment. One reason for avoiding medical care for depression could be the fear of stigmatization. Considering the varying levels of stereotypes and prejudices about mental illness and how it is treated in different cultures, it is interesting to compare the experience of dealing with stigma (...) in several countries. This study examines the influence of the cultural context on the experience of stigmatization of students from St. Petersburg and Helsinki. Data collection was carried out in 2019-2020 using in-depth interviews and autobiographies. The diversification of collection methods has increased the response of informants in Finland. The analysis of the obtained data was carried out using the Uwe Flick thematic coding technique which was developed to compare two or more groups of informants. The results of the study showed that the Finnish socio-cultural context was more friendly towards students with depression: participants from Helsinki noted a decrease in stigma around this condition in recent years. Seeking professional help was a way to reduce stigma by showing others that they are fighting the disease. In St. Petersburg, students feared the stigma associated with seeking medical help and put off going to a therapist. It was more difficult for them than for Finnish students to tell their relatives about their condition. In revealing the fact of depression to others, participants from St. Petersburg used various strategies to combat stigma. (shrink)

Even though depression has become one of the most common diseases in the world and significantly worsens the quality of life, many people who encounter its symptoms do not seek professional help and remain without treatment. One reason for avoiding medical care for depression could be the fear of stigmatization. Considering the varying levels of stereotypes and prejudices about mental illness and how it is treated in different cultures, it is interesting to compare the experience of dealing with stigma (...) in several countries. This study examines the influence of the cultural context on the experience of stigmatization of students from St. Petersburg and Helsinki. Data collection was carried out in 2019-2020 using in-depth interviews and autobiographies. The diversification of collection methods has increased the response of informants in Finland. The analysis of the obtained data was carried out using the Uwe Flick thematic coding technique which was developed to compare two or more groups of informants. The results of the study showed that the Finnish socio-cultural context was more friendly towards students with depression: participants from Helsinki noted a decrease in stigma around this condition in recent years. Seeking professional help was a way to reduce stigma by showing others that they are fighting the disease. In St. Petersburg, students feared the stigma associated with seeking medical help and put off going to a therapist. It was more difficult for them than for Finnish students to tell their relatives about their condition. In revealing the fact of depression to others, participants from St. Petersburg used various strategies to combat stigma. (shrink)

Be Who You Are is one of the earliest published books of dialogues with Jean Klein. Written in the lucid and eloquent style which characterises his work, each chapter is composed of an introductory discourse followed by questions and answers. "The 'eternal present', our theme in these meetings, lies within the depth of ourselves. It is the eternal awareness of the Self. Seen from the Ultimate, the world projected by the mind appears and disappears, in other words, it "becomes". When (...) we talk of time and space, it must be thoroughly understood that their reality is relative, it is a reality in the world of becoming. But beyond space-time is that stillness which knows no becoming." This much sought after book, by one of the most important exponents of Advaita in recent years, is now available again from Non-Duality Press. (shrink)

According to philosophers who ground your anticipation of future experiences in psychological continuity and connectedness, it is rational to anticipate the experiences of someone other than yourself, such as a self that is the product of fission or of replication. In this article, I concur that it is rational to anticipate the experiences of the product of fission while denying the rationality of anticipating the experiences of a replica. In defending my position, I offer the following explanation of why you (...) have good reason to anticipate the experiences of your post-fission successor but not your replica: in the former case, you become somebody else, whereas, in the latter case, you are merely replaced by somebody else. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Are Mental Health "Peer Support Workers" Experts by Experience?The author reports no conflict of interests.In this well-argued paper, Dr. Abdi Sanati asks whether a person's experience of mental illness could be the basis for professional expertise and concludes that, "on its own," it cannot be. Elsewhere he states that "the different forms of knowledge that are required for expertise … could not be produced solely on the (...) basis of personal experience" (Sanati, 2024, 107). The qualifications "on its own" and "solely" suggest that personal experience of mental illness could be the basis for professional expertise if other conditions are also met. What are these conditions, and can they be met? Gratefully, Sanati provides an excellent exposition of a concept of expertise and the conditions that are required for satisfying it.Expertise needs to be thought of as a "form of life" that requires more than the accumulation of knowledge and cannot happen in isolation. To become an expert, you need to be part of a community through which you can acquire factual knowledge (knowledge-that) and acquire the practical capacities and dispositions (knowledge-how) that enable you to conduct actions related to your area of expertise. With training over time, experts develop tacit knowledge that enables them to "ap ply background theories to new cases," which is why an expert is able to deal with a multitude of cases that appear different from each other. Experts should be able to hold a relatively cohesive view of their subject matter and see how it all 'holds together'.The importance of community for the possibility of becoming an expert is further emphasized by Sanati's appeal to Wittgenstein's Private-Language Argument. A 'private language,' if such a thing were to exist, is a language that enables the person to express mental states with reference only to what is occurring in the speaker's mind and known through introspection. This language, in being private, makes sense only to the speaker and is not comprehensible to others. Introspection allows privileged access to my mental states, which thus become a unique source of knowledge available only to me. And the argument against such a private language is that it is impossible, for in being unintelligible to others, it becomes nonsensical as such. The reasons behind this have to do with the nature of language as a rule-based activity that requires intersubjective agreement, engaging in which is to partake in a form-of-life. [End Page 113]Putting aside the details of the Private-Language Argument, I am interested in the conclusion that Sanati draws from it. He starts by pointing out that what is taken as the basis for expertise-by-experience is the supposed privileged access to one's mental states that leads to a unique form of knowledge. It is this knowledge that underlies the claim to expertise. Sanati's view is that one cannot acquire a kind of knowledge completely inaccessible to others yet expressed in language as this would amount to use of a private language, which is impossible. And so, the person is either expressing nonsense or is merely using shared language. If the latter, then the alleged uniqueness of the experience is lost as it has been brought under a rule-based form of life.Sanati seems to imply that experience can only constitute a unique form of knowledge if it arises from a single mind through introspection and use of a private language. Given that this is not possible, the experience can no longer be unique. But I do not see why it cannot be a form of knowledge which, while not being unique to a single individual, is still an expression of human experience that only a proportion of the population go through, the proportion who are diagnosed with a certain mental health condition. In other words, a form of knowledge does not to have to be unique to be distinct, and if it is distinct then perhaps it can constitute the basis for expertise if other conditions are also met. In fact, this is suggested by Sanati's conclusion when he writes: "for the community of experts to exist there... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetic Experience and Education:Themes and QuestionsDeborah Kerdeman"Being with" music. Attentive responsiveness in teaching. Scholarly learning as engagement with beauty. Three evocative images of aesthetic experience come to light in the essays by Custodero, Hansen, and Neumann. From the musical play of children conducting imaginary orchestras to the vocational aspirations of adults who gaze through telescopes or study paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, aesthetic experience spans a (...) range of activities and ages. No matter the setting or moment, aesthetic experience vitalizes our lives with meaning and joy. Why this is so and what difference this makes for education emerge as overarching concerns in this set of papers. Addressing these issues, the authors articulate a number of commonthemes and reach similar conclusions about the nature and value of aesthetic experience.I want to identify and analyze key ideas that run throughout these essays. Doing so deepens our appreciation of the authors' insights and underscores the importance of the project they undertake. I also want to examine three questions that the essays suggest but do not develop. Exploring these questions, I hope to further enrich our understanding of aesthetic experience and its place in education.First and foremost, aesthetic experience for all three authors integrates multiple ways of knowing and enables individuals to perceive connections that they might otherwise overlook. According to Custodero, aesthetic experience harmonizes imagination, physicality, and "thinking-in-action." [End Page 88] Thinking-in-action, Custodero says, while "critical and consequential," is nonverbal and nonjudgmental — unifying rather than analytic. Synthesizing bodily movement, imagination, and thought, aesthetic experience reveals "surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena." The theme of integration is echoed in Neumann's description of scholarly learning as aesthetic experience. Scholarly learning does not shun feeling or lived experience, Neumann writes. This way of knowing instead is "deeply emotional and personal." Insight fuses with emotion, enabling scholars to "feel the whole picture," as David the astronomer puts it in his interview with Neumann. For Hansen, aesthetic experience connotes heightened perception, a way of being that attends to nuances of gesture that would otherwise remain invisible. "The aesthetic highlights aspects of wonder and of beauty that emerge, spontaneously and unrehearsed," Hansen explains. A form of creativity, aesthetic perception combines with moral and intellectual understanding to fully embrace "the living dynamic gestalt" of teaching and learning.Aesthetic experience thus integrates mind, body, and emotion. Hansen links aesthetic experience to moral judgment as well. Integrating various ways of knowing, aesthetic experience enables individuals to perceive and understand relationships that pulse throughout the social and natural world. Such understanding is pleasurable, the authors agree.Aesthetic experience not only is integrative. It also is interactive. Custodero's musicians interact with instruments, musical scores, and other individuals. Neumann's scholars interact with ideas and scholarly materials. Hansen's preservice teachers interact with works of art, subject matter, students, and one another. Interacting with people and things, individuals become absorbed in what they are doing. "Being with" music is howCustodero puts it. Carmen, the professor of music in Neumann's essay, says that playing music well "is like a complete focus of oneness."Being absorbed in aesthetic interaction does not discount or dissolve the ability to make decisions or direct action. Aesthetic experience rather presumes and promotes "aesthetic agency," to borrow a phrase from Custodero. "To 'be in the moment,'" Custodero writes, "is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital." Hansen's description of aesthetic perception combines attentiveness and responsiveness in a "dynamic combination of patience, listening, and initiative." Neumann states that scholarly learning is an experience of "deep engrossment." Such engrossment does not extinguish the self, however. In the words of David the astronomer, feeling "the whole picture... is a combination of both what you see, sort of an instinctive or primal thing, and also your knowledge of what, you know, you put together." [End Page 89]The interactive nature of aesthetic experience thus signifies a kind of "agency-in-situ." Aesthetic experience is shaped or directed by the contribution and initiative of individuals. But individuals cannot act in advance of experience or know what to do, unless they are... (shrink)

Background: -/- Having colonised the social role ‘woman’, and entering female-only spaces, there is one bastion of womanhood left which has always been closed off to men who claim to be women: the inner life, the phenomenology of inhabiting a female sexed body. This bastion has come under attack; trans women claim that they ‘feel like a woman’ or that they are ‘a woman inside’. The aim of this essay is to assess such claims. -/- The appropriation of ‘womanhood’ by (...) males leads to the sidelining of women. Trans women are lauded as exemplars of womanhood. They are crowned ‘woman of the year’, become university women’s officers, represent women in political parties, or are being nominated for a women’s prize for fiction. The message is that trans women make for better ‘women’. The philosophical underpinnings for this view can be found in the work of Talia Mae Bettcher. -/- Road Map: -/- Part I: Recently, trans women have been claiming to have the phenomenal experience of women (I am a woman inside; I feel like a woman). Relying on Thomas Nagel[1] and Frank Jackson,[2] I will argue that they are in error. The inner life of trans women is fundamentally different from that of women, because the former cannot take up the female perspective. Being a woman means, among other things, to have a female body and, consequently, to experience yourself and the world through a female body. This is the core of being a woman, and trans women can never satisfy this condition, because they are – and remain – male-bodied (regardless of any bodily modifications). Thus, such claims are simply wrong. Trans women are not physiologically equipped to share in the female phenomenal experience. -/- Without a female body there is no female experience; the latter relies on the presence of the former.[3] This means that trans women are not women because a) they lack the respective body, and b) they lack the respective phenomenal experience. Their imitations of the female (experience) don’t make them into women. -/- Part II: Trans theory offers a way out, by sidelining the body. Talia Mae Bettcher’s account of ‘first-person authority’ (henceforth, FPA) about gender as well as the ‘liberatory project’ constitutes the strongest defence available to take the avowals of trans people (about sex, gender and their phenomenal experience) seriously. Bettcher’s theory has two advantages. It doesn’t matter whether you have a female body or not, and it doesn’t matter whether you are mistaken about your avowals or not (i.e. the epistemic question). The avowals of transgender people have ‘ethical force’, rather than epistemic force. This would mean that we need to affirm trans women in their belief that ‘trans women are women’, and it would follow that the ethical force would underwrite their claims of feeling like a woman inside. I will subject Bettcher’s cogitations to philosophical scrutiny; this is something that, surprisingly, is missing in the literature. Most subsequent writers adopt Bettcher’s FPA uncritically. I will conclude that Bettcher’s project fails, and that trans claims about having the phenomenal experience of women cannot find support from Bettcher’s FPA. -/- [1] Nagel, T. 1974. What is it like to be a bat?, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83:4, pp. 435–450. -/- [2] Jackson, F. 1986. What Mary didn’t know, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 83:5, pp. 291–295. -/- [3] A stillborn girl is female, although she will never have female experiences. Her body is the condition of the possibility for having female experiences, i.e. for ‘being’ a woman. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World ed. by Beatriz Ilari, Susan YoungAmy Christine BeegleBeatriz Ilari and Susan Young, eds., Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016)Historically, most studies of children’s musical learning have been informed by stage theories of developmental psychology and focused on school music or private instrumental lesson contexts. Over the past few decades, scholars have conducted research that (...) increasingly explores children’s involvement with music in contexts outside of formal learning settings, utilizing methods and models from ethnomusicology, sociology, social psychology, and/or cultural psychology. Nine individually authored chapters in the volume, Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World, edited by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young, convey results, applications, and extensions of one such project that reaches beyond the conventional ethnographic music education study.The bulk of this collection contains findings and interpretations from a collaborative project called MyPlace, MyMusic, followed by several additional chapters that provide descriptions and narratives from subsequent related projects. The original project included fourteen scholars from the International Society of Music Education-Early Childhood Commission, who conducted in-home observations and interviews with parents and children in order to examine the nature of, influences on, and meaning of musical activities that took place in the homes of middle-class seven-year-olds in diverse locations, including Brazil, Denmark, [End Page 105] Greece, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the U.K., and the United States.Importantly, the project’s designers attempted to avoid complications of transcultural developments by asking each researcher to select children whose families had not recently migrated to their country/locality. The seventeen participating children from twelve countries were also of the same ethnicity and lived in the same “locality” as each researcher in order to ease communication during in-home observations and interviews. Results shed light on issues of children’s family life, schooling, identity, gender, and social class.This project presents a unique contribution to the field of music education in a number of ways. First, most previous studies of music in the homes of children have centered around preschoolers, toddlers, and infants, whereas the present project focuses on seven-year-old children, whose age places them on the cusp of crossing from early to middle childhood. Second, most previous music education researchers have considered issues of social class, ethnicity, and race as independent variables, but the methodology for this project calls for observation and description of each child in his or her home first, followed by comparison of the “cases” to each other. Third, the researchers utilize a Wiki platform to share and collaboratively interpret data collected from home lives of children (photographs, video and audio recordings, texts, and pdf files) among researchers from different countries.The volume is organized into three major sections. Susan Young and Jèssica Pérez-Moreno set the scene in the first two chapters by describing the theoretical underpinnings and methodology for the MyPlace, MyMusic project. The second section of the book includes four chapters in which several individual researchers interpret the project’s data based upon the themes of children’s private musical worlds; belonging/identity/gendered meanings of children’s music making; perspectives and influences of parents; and the role of social class on children’s musical lives. The last three chapters of the book provide detailed descriptions of projects and extensions that developed after the MyPlace, MyMusic project.Following the introductory chapter, in which Ilari and Young explain the background, rationale, goals, and methods of the MyPlace, MyMusic project and provide a reader-friendly table that presents the cultural background and “sources of musical stimulation in the home” for each participating child,1 Susan Young outlines the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the project in the first chapter. Rather than viewing children’s learning as developing and socializing into adulthood, the project researchers were encouraged to look at children as being instead of becoming, as subjects, rather than objects of research, and as having opportunities for agency that are contextual. This theoretical framework stems from the field of Childhood Studies (as cultivated in Scandinavia [End Page 106] and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (禅道の千路) by Bret W. Davis (review)Steve G. LoftsBret W. Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (禅道の千路)There is no shortage of books on Zen from almost every imaginable angle. And so, what makes Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (禅道の千路) by Bret W. Davis unique (...) enough to take up and read, and even re-read? And who should read it? The answers to these questions depend on who you are and what you are looking for. If you are simply curious about what Zen philosophy and practice is or is not, a student, a professor looking for a textbook on Zen Buddhism for your course, or a practitioner seeking to deepen your understanding of what it is that you are practicing, then you will almost certainly enjoy and profit greatly from this book. Davis brings to the page over thirty years of active engagement with Zen Buddhism as a practitioner, teacher of philosophy and Zen Buddhism, and scholar. Davis provides his reader with an accessible, comprehensive, and well-documented introduction to the teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism. What makes this introduction stand out and be particularly effective is that Davis provides us with a scholarly and philosophical account of Zen Buddhism that is animated by his personal experience as a long-term practitioner in Japan at the Rinzai Zen monastery of Shōkokuji and as a teacher and director of the Heart of Zen Meditation Group at Loyola University Maryland. However, as the Japanese subtitle of this work, 禅道の千路, makes clear, there are “a thousand paths of the way of Zen,” and Davis is careful to show us the paths he has traveled while leaving it to the reader to find their own paths along the way.In the course of the book’s twenty-four chapters, Davis provides his reader with a clear account and philosophical interpretation of [End Page 159] the core teachings of Buddhism (the four noble truths, impermanence, the no-self doctrine, co-origination and interconnection of the one and the many, nirvana and samsara, the great death, and so on), always relating his theoretical explanations to the concrete perspective of the practice of Zen Buddhism. His account of Zen Buddhism situates it in the historical tradition of Buddhism as it was transplanted from India to China, from China to Japan, and today from Japan to other places in the world. Davis connects these teachings to the practice of Zen, providing readers with a concrete and firsthand introduction to such Zen practices as zazen (seated meditation), kinhin (walking meditation), sanzen (interviews with a teacher), koān work, and samu (meditative work), and to the Zen practice of cultivating naturalness (jinen) in and through such art forms as karate and flower arrangement (ikebana), the Japanese aesthetics of “cut-continuance” and wabi-sabi, as well as Zen-inspired gardens, painting, and music. The book also explores a number of classical and contemporary philosophical issues from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism: the problem of the one and the many, the ethical relation to the other, the problem of evil, the nature of love, freedom and determinacy, what is God, our relation to nature, and so on. Finally, the presentation of the core teachings of Zen Buddhism and the discussion of philosophical issues is undertaken in and through an intercultural and interreligious dialogue in which the similarities and dissimilarities between different cultural and faith traditions are explored and used to help illustrate the unique standpoint of Zen Buddhism. One can mention here Chapter 12 titled “Dying to Live: Zen, Pure Land Buddhism, and Christianity.” This synoptic view of Zen Buddhism is presented in an elegant, personal style that is clear, concise, and expresses a genuine passion and spirit of openness. In copious endnotes, Davis has also provided the reader with a wealth of material for further study that has been judiciously selected from good English translations of readings in the classical works as well as contemporary scholarship. Finally, with an eye to the use of this text in a classroom or in study groups, Davis has... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparative Theology Is Not “Business-as-Usual Theology”:Personal Witness from a Buddhist ChristianPaul F. KnitterThe following reflections find their stimulus and start in a paper prepared for a doctoral seminar on comparative theology led by John Makransky at Boston College. I was asked whether I was a comparative theologian and, if so, what difference it had made in my professional work as a theologian and in my personal life as a (...) Christian. My basic answer was: “Yes, I think so” and “A lot!”In this reworking and expansion of that seminar paper, I hope to unpack that “a lot.” This will enable me not only to carry on the search for clarity (and integrity) that I began in my book Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian,1 but also to comment on the promise of comparative theology (CT) and why I fear that this promise all too often goes unfulfilled.What I’m getting at is capsulized in a blurb that John Thatamanil wrote for Michelle Voss Roberts’s Dualities: A Theology of Difference:2 “Comparative theology done well is a dangerous discipline precisely because it raises provocative questions and threatens to put an end to business-as-usual theology.” I fear that some comparative theologians are not taking their job seriously enough—or they are not following through with what they say they want to do. They are carrying on CT as business as usual.moving beyond business-as-usual theologyComparative theology, which two decades ago might have been considered a fade but has become a fixture in Christian theology,3 makes the bold, indeed thoroughly revolutionary, claim that in order to properly carry on the task of Christian theology, the traditional Christian sources—Scripture, tradition, the lex orandi or spiritual practice of the communities—are not enough. A Christian theologian, in order to be a Christian theologian, must also draw on the experience, teachings, scriptures, and insights of other spiritual communities and traditions. CT embodies Raimon Panikkar’s often [End Page 181] cited (at least by me!) dictum: In order to understand who I am, I have to ask who you are. And in order to know my God I have to ask about your God.4If what comparative theologians are here claiming is true, if my understanding of myself is incomplete without my understanding of you, then after I understand you, I can be pretty sure that my understanding of myself is going to be different—really different. Otherwise, I really didn’t need to talk with you in the first place! And this is why Thatamanil can rightly sound his unsettling warning that if CT is another form of business-as-usual theology, if it is not leading to some really new discoveries about oneself and one’s own tradition, then it is not living up to its job description. And that, as I tried to say elsewhere, is what I suspect might be the case.As I survey the output of comparative theologians over the past fifteen years, I sense that, with some promising exceptions among younger scholars, they are strong on comparing but soft on concluding. More pointedly, comparative theology, so far, has been more comparison than theology. There have been intricate comparisons of Christian texts with Hindu texts and of Christian theologians/mystics with Buddhist scholars/mystics. Striking similarities and stark differences have been noted and examined, sometime meticulously. But, where are the clear, creative, courageous conclusions as to what Christians can learn from these comparisons? What might need to be clarified or changed or discarded in traditional Christian doctrine? Especially on the neuralgic and politically dangerous (for Catholics) issue of the uniqueness of Christ, I am not aware of any comparativists who have learned anything new. I would be delighted to be proved wrong.5I suspect that the reason why some comparative theologians are caught in business-as-usual theology is that they are also still lingering under the influence of postmodernism’s and postliberal theology’s insistence on the dominance of diversity. In their concern to respect and defend differences, postmodernists and postliberals conclude that cultures and religions are more different than they... (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 208-212. … intervals of destructuring paradoxically carry the momentum for the ongoing process by which thought and perception are brought into relation toward transformative action. —Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation 1 Facing a blank canvas or blank page is a moment of pure potential, one that can be enervating or paralyzing. It causes a pause, a hesitation, in anticipation of the moment of inception—even of one that never comes. The implication is that the (...) blank is yours in that moment, and it calls on you to act on it, to think into it, to create on it. Each blank canvas gives you time, of an undefined length, to transform that canvas’ inherent potential into a work. This two-dimensional plane of potential can be projected into a space, which the body can then occupy. When you “destructure” a space in the same way, prepare it to be a blank, much as you build a canvas, you allow your entire body to enter the space of potential, and you rest in anticipation of work, like the hand poised above the page. Artists have found that the deliberate creation of that space of potential through sealing the space and painting it white, thereby erasing details and distractions, can be such a transformative experience as to help define their whole practice. The cessation of distraction, the absence of indicator that a “blanked” workspace provides allows for a new presence of mind, it gives them the room, literally, to move into their work, and from there to move their work into the world. The workspace for the artist, the studio, is often perceived as a lab-like condensation of the gallery or museum, the traditional and idealized white cube. Similarly, with the blank page, a concrete relation between space and time comes forward as the intentional simplification of the architecture changes behavior and perception within the space. The work of “blanking” the studio space is a meditative reduction, an erasure, and in a way, an attempt at drawing away from the world beyond the studio - the sealed space is meant to recede from reality, to become abstracted by its willed lack of details and distractions. Within that space the time for a new beginning is made more present, more attainable, and the focus it fosters becomes another tool to aid creation. At the formative moment of his artistic practice, Tom Friedman used the blank of his studio, saturated in white, sealed off from the world, to fight velocity. He describes how he projected his vision of the end goal, the museum - a place he believes to be defined by slow contemplation - onto his own studio experience. He then sat and reflected on common objects, one by one, framed by the blank box he had created. The domestic objects he brought into the space to study foreshadow his mature works, where often the quotidian object has a single additional element – his intense labor. Friedman makes discrete objects through absurdly intense and focused labor, epitomized, perhaps by his 1,000 hours of Staring , made from 1992-97: Tom Friedman. 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) His labor, to use his own words, is his way to “bring all of who you are to the experience.” Friedman shares his labor, allows the slow, deliberate pace of his work born in the studio to penetrate the museum. Nothing seems effortless, or a gesture, the labor is apparent, displayed, and tangible. He gives us the labor, the personal investment in the physical that saved art for him, that divorced the work from the language he cites as a factor of alienation. When we see his work we do not see words, we see acts, we see objects. He has forced the studio as workspace into the exhibition space, as he stuffs hundreds of more hours of labor into his shows with each new piece, filling the space with material and labor, material and labor – his involvement, his investment, is his gift to us as the viewers, as he introduces the laborious and contemplative pace he feels belongs to the museum. He saves us also from the alienation of language, which first drove him into the sealed studio and away from the discourse of his school. He presents us with his real, the object which stands in stark contrast to the white slate of the studio, the sealed white box he started from, where his individual, self-contained objects begin and end, completed through the intensity of isolation, first of the individual artist, and then of the material he chooses to slowly, slowly, slowly work: Tom Friedman. Untitled (1992) In his in-depth analysis of galleries as a blank white cube, Brian O’Doherty emphasizes the religious connotations implied in the strict laws of the exhibition space and the valuation, aesthetics and elements of control he feels it imposes upon the work. Like Friedman, he recognizes the power of the restricted space – indicating the “perceptual fields of force” – that act on any object introduced into it. Going beyond Friedman’s assessment of the space as highly utilitarian for focusing his perception, O’Doherty emphasizes the rejection of the physical body of the artist or observer, saying that the cube allows for only observation - eyes and mind. He later parallels the picture frame as a psychological container for the artist with the room as the same for the observer. In both cases, this is an emphasis on the alienating nature of the relationship – just as the artist is kept out of the frame by the picture, in the gallery the art forces the body of the spectator out, calling for a self-referential purity. Patrick Ireland. White Cube (1998) O’Doherty makes a point of saying that the installation shot of the gallery without figures is “one of the icons of our visual culture.” In recent years, however, installation shots have begun to include figures, in some cases they are essential to understanding the scale and even the nature of the work, specifically with work that captures the experience of the space and the way that it varies from a white cube. The work of Olafur Eliasson is a case in point, as the Danish artist uses elements of scientific and natural phenomena to alter perception within the controlled gallery environment, tweaking and redirecting O’Doherty’s “perceptual fields of force” to make points about the act of seeing, or seeing yourself seeing, to quote the artist. This indicates a shift in the role of the artwork, not to exclude the body and stand discretely and self-sufficiently, but to include it, to manipulate it and to make the observer aware of the nature of that manipulation and the work’s ability to manipulate. Olafur Eliasson. 360º room for all colours (2002) So though in O’Doherty’s analysis, the intense blankness of the gallery pushed the observer out in favor of the artwork’s isolation, artists can replicate this inhumane sterility in their own workspace to focus their work on the influence of the gallery right from inception. This can be interpreted as an almost opposite understanding of the purpose of sealing and whitewashing the workspace as stated by Friedman. He sought a refuge from the critical language of the art school, and a space that, like the museum, gave him a protracted sense of time, and, he felt, welcomed him in, “to bring all of who you are,” as opposed to O’Doherty’s feeling that the museum was asking you, at least in body, to leave, and allow the work to take on its own life. Friedman does not seem to imply the tension with the cube and critical stance that O’Doherty prioritizes. Where Friedman finds a refuge, O’Doherty defines an opponent. In a third position, Robert Irwin describes his sealed studio space as “the world.” Though he made the same effort as Friedman to seal out all influences and distractions, he implies that he is in dialogue with the world through his own concentration and perception. This is reminiscent of the nature of the monad, as interpreted by Deleuze, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, a sealed container that contains the universe. He went through the same ritual described by Friedman, sealing up the space, painting it white, and then forcing himself to remain inside, staring at his own work, training his concentration relentlessly. But he found that the room became the distraction: …he became aware that a thin crack along the wall a few yards away from the canvas likewise exerted its presence; that when he plastered that crack over and repainted the wall, the canvas itself presented an entirely new aspect.2 The context was in a relentless dialogue with the work, and trying to neutralize that dialogue, to mute the conversation between space and object, became part of his ritual as he “fixed” his space each day in the hope of total concentration on the work. Ultimately, Irwin shaped the trajectory of his art by relinquishing the studio, establishing a post-studio practice, where the work is conceived and created out in the world, in dialogue with the world and reflective of the conditions it finds surrounding it. The white cube failed to ever achieve neutrality, his heightened concentration prevented him from ever neutralizing the space, so, instead of continuing to try to maintain the charade of a perfect blank, he acknowledged the unstoppable voice of place and turned all his efforts onto the object and the world, as a constant dialogue. Some artists push their studio space far from purity, domesticating it like a lair or a living room, and others destroy it, fill it with chaos or detritus, blacken or clutter it so as never to be starting from a blank, and thereby try to avoid the anxiety of facing that void. Similarly artists may never prepare a white canvas, a clean page, a marble block, or other form that is intentionally lacking, in order to try to escape the dialogue with emptiness. But Irwin, like O’Doherty, found an opponent in the white cube, and he learned not to fight it, rather he ended the conflict by making it an ally, an interlocutor, a collaborator. We can vainly strive to start from nothing, to find the lull, the clearing, and to always consider what we do in balance with the empty set. Somehow that intangible cloud of hazy nothingness, that softness of a lapse continually offers a place to bounce off of, to react to, to wrestle with, to rest with, in tension, or a place to begin. Robert Irwin. Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998) NOTES 1 Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. p271. 2 MOMA, NY. Eliasson, 360 ? Room for All Colours . Installation. 2002. (shrink)

Rediscover the Promise of Enlightenment As Western culture has embraced practices like meditation and yoga, has something been lost in translation? “What we see in America today in both the yoga boom and mindfulness fad,” writes Dr. Miles Neale, “is a presentation of technique alone, sanitized and purged of the dynamic teachings in wisdom and ethics that are essential for true liberation.” For anyone seeking a path dedicated to both authentic personal growth and the overthrow of the nihilism, hedonism, and (...) materialism that are threatening our planet, this compelling teacher presents a well-conceived, sustainable solution with Gradual Awakening. The core of this book is Tibetan Buddhism’s “gradual path”—or Lam Rim—interpreted with fresh insights from modern scientific research. Offering an illuminating new presentation of Tibet’s deep psychology, meditative techniques, and virtuous rituals, Dr. Neale presents a time-honored path of enormous transformational potential. Each chapter serves as a practical manual that will allow you to experiment with and actualize the benefits of role-modeling visualization, affirmations, contemplative themes, textual recitation, prayers, altars, offerings, and meditation. Here you’ll explore: • Uprooting the “sickness of paradigm”—why a complete spiritual practice must directly confront the fundamental human suffering caused by the modern ethos of scientific reductionism • The Lam Rim path—the history, heritage, and power of this 30-step “hero’s journey” of awakening • Evolutionary self-care—understanding the Buddhist concept of renunciation as a form of self-love and healing • Radical altruism—awakening Bodhicitta, our innate aspiration to evolve fully in service to others • Quantum vision—how the teaching of “emptiness” allows us to pierce the illusion of materialism and accurately perceive the subtlest nature of reality • Dr. Neale’s MAPS process (Maturity, Acceptance, Possibility, and Seeds) to integrate and manifest key insights and skills in your everyday life The mass-market dilutions of Eastern wisdom that focus on symptom relief and easy answers have left behind the ultimate promise of spiritual practice: enlightenment. “Enlightenment is an unfolding process—open to everyone.” writes Dr. Neale. For most of us, this path to awakening must be realized through a gradual process: building on incremental insights into who we truly are, learning to care for ourselves and others, and discovering creative ways to engage the problems we all face. Gradual Awakening will serve as a lifelong companion for anyone willing to embrace a new paradigm that integrates science with spirit, theory with practice, and personal meditation with the desire to transform the world. A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit the Buddhist nuns of Kopan Nunnery in Nepal. (shrink)

Disney's computer‐animated musical film, Moana tells the tale of Moana, the daughter of Tui, the chief of a Polynesian island, Motunui. Bound by the legendary tradition of her ancestors, Moana is expected to follow her lineage and take over as chief when she grows up. As the authors dig beneath the surface level of the story, they find a metaphorical and philosophical level to Moana's journey. The story of Moana has layers. First, it is literally a tale of Moana's voyage (...) outside beyond the reef so that she can restore the heart of Te Fiti and save the people of Motunui. She closes this tale with a happy ending as she simultaneously lives the life that she freely chooses, becomes the leader of her people (by saving them) as her parents wanted, and honors her tradition insofar as she restores her ancestors' tradition of wayfinding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When the Political Becomes Personal:Circumcision as a Cause and as a Parental DecisionJ. Steven SvobodaAs I prepared for the arrival of my first child, a son, a central activity that I previously saw as political suddenly also became very personal. I had founded a non-profit organization in 1997 devoted to educating the world that genital cutting of a child, regardless of a child's gender, is unnecessary and harmful. This (...) includes male circumcision. In 2001, as part of my non-profit work I led a team that went to the United Nations in Geneva and for the first time, put the issue of male circumcision as a human rights violation in the United Nations record. At the time, my then wife was pregnant with our first child, a son. (I had the ultrasound photo of my son-to-be on my nightstand while in Geneva.) Now the circumcision question would be posed to me!A few months after the Geneva trip, when it came time in early 2002 for my son's birth on the US territory of Guam, I naturally was never going to agree to the procedure. Nevertheless, I was trying not to inject my own beliefs into the arrival of my first child. My children's mother, while Jewish, is a pediatrician who always had some doubts about the wisdom of circumcision and easily agreed with my desire to keep our son intact. No one in either of our families had any serious problems with our decision.The nurse at the hospital in Guam where my wife worked and gave birth asked me a total of five separate times if I wanted my son to be circumcised. Each time, I answered, "No," without saying more, until the fifth time, when I politely added, "You do know that there is no medical reason for this to be done, right?" The nurse replied in a chirpy voice, "I know." I then asked, "Why do you ask parents about it then?" She replied, "Because they want it sometimes." Well, the odd thing about that is there is no other medically unnecessary procedure on their children for which parents are repeatedly solicited. And if I had agreed even one time, I am sure that my child would have been circumcised [End Page 73] without any follow-up questions to make sure I really wanted this done. Besides, at least in the absence of any medical condition making it necessary (which is essentially never the case), it should not be my decision to make, nor his mother's, but rather the child's whose body it is.The oddest aspect of this whole chain of events may be that I was not given a single shred of information explaining why I should support my son being cut. My son had zero issues after being left intact, and how could it be otherwise? My advice, naturally, to parents expecting boys (or girls, or intersex children, for that matter) is to educate yourself. You will learn, the more you look into these issues, that there are thousands of people around the world, including countless physicians and other experts, who believe childhood circumcision is as outmoded, useless, and as harmful a practice as footbinding. Why not leave the choice for the child to make about their own body? No asserted medical reason withstands the most minimal scrutiny. And religious claims must stop at the boundaries of another person's body, even if the person is your child. Parents: you have the right to teach your children your beliefs, but your children may not follow your beliefs, and they have the right to make their own decisions, so please consider refraining from marking their bodies with your religion. Two months to the day after his birth, I was holding my son in Washington, DC, having just traveled halfway around the world from Guam. (I was in DC to receive the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Center's (NOCIRC) Human Rights Award, which I was presented with for my founding of the non-profit.)My own experience with circumcision strongly influenced my decision. For a decade, I felt that no other single... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 69-72 [Access article in PDF] Christian Experiences with Buddhist Spirituality: A Response Robert Thurman Columbia University Recently I read an account on the CNN website of a statement made at the Kumbh Mela at Allahabad in India, where about eighty million devotees of Hinduism were joined in their worship of the grace of the Goddess River Ganga by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, informal head (...) of Tibetan Buddhists and formal head of the Tibetan government in exile. His Holiness also joined the leaders of Hinduism, various Shankaracharyas and others, in a formal statement in which they requested with the followers of other world religions not to persist in the practice of aggressive conversion of the followers of other religions. The statement addressed a special plea to Christians and Muslims, who may currently be the most intense in their worldwide missionary activities.The writer of the CNN article was clearly cynical about this, mentioning, as if to undercut the force of their appeal to other religions, that the Hindu leaders themselves wanted to declare India a Hindu nation. He noted that the Dalai Lama "giggled" when he sprinkled himself with Ganga water out of respect for Hindu beliefs, but declined to immerse himself in the river, saying it was too cold.His Holiness has often challenged leaders of world religions, including Buddhists, Hindus, and secular humanists (which he considers a world religion/ideology, whether Marxist or liberal democratic), by saying that now is past the time when anyone should be attempting to convert others to a different belief system or institutional affiliation. If persisted in, it will lead to worse violence in the future than it already has in the past. His position seems eminently reasonable, looking realistically at the world situation, the powerful technologies of communication and possible scale of violence. Yet people filled with enthusiasm for their saving faith tend to feel deprived if they cannot have a mission to save others with it.I do not think His Holiness means that you cannot share your enthusiasm, or make the jewels of faith, wisdom, and compassion of your tradition accessible to others, or even dialogue with others comparing your tradition with theirs. He travels the world teaching Buddhism, mostly to Buddhists, but freely to anyone who is interested. But then he does tell those who are not Buddhists notto convert to Buddhism. Rather, he cautions, they should take whatever they learn and use anything that seems good to them to enhance their original tradition, thereby remaining integrated with [End Page 69] their families, communities, and local customs, perhaps even enriching their own traditions. Those who are Buddhists from birth he urges to study other traditions, learn from them, and critically extricate themselves from feelings of superiority or estrangement. And some who may already have chosen to become Buddhist he strongly cautions not to criticize their birth traditions or look down on their followers.What I love about the essays in this collection is that they all seem to be learning from Buddhism and appreciate its traditions, yet they interpret it in Christian terms, apply it to their own Christian understanding, and practice an enriched Christianity, perhaps what Bardwell Smith so aptly calls in his essay "becoming a Christian." I feel privileged to respond to the deep personal quest for truth I sense within each essay. I am not going to review each essay point by point, though I will touch on each of the five as I follow a kind of pilgrimage through them. Though all five essays are personal and confessional, those by Ingram and Muck are perhaps more theoretical in tone, Adeney and Frohlich more contemplative in focus, and Smith combines both in a special combination I will save for last.Paul Ingram writes as a man who floats contentedly in a sea of God's grace, the vision of which seems to have been opened for him by Martin Luther. While he floats, he reflects deeply and knowledgeably about both Pure Land and Zen Buddhisms, acknowledging how his appreciation of the Christian... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Witnessing Trauma:Emotional Challenges in Medical InterpretationMaja Milkowska-ShibataHaving a background in public health but no clinical experience, I never expected to be given the opportunity to work directly with patients. This changed when I became involved in medical interpretation. During my first year of service, I mostly assisted with primary care appointments until I was assigned to my first appointment in a cancer treatment center. The moment I stepped (...) into the distinctive atmosphere of that place, the gravity of the patients' circumstances became strikingly apparent. Each individual was [End Page E8] suffering from a life-threatening condition, which was unlike anything I was used to witnessing.The staff seemed to know each and every patient. I noticed a patient in a wheelchair accompanied by a relative carrying an oxygen tank. Someone brought gifts for the receptionists. A Christmas tree sat in the corner of the waiting area, ready for the holidays. The facility clearly conveyed an effort to resemble a home-like environment. "They must be regulars," I thought grimly.After completing a routine appointment with an elderly patient who was feeling weak, the patient requested an IV drip. My official assignment was over, and I could have gone home at that point, but something compelled me to stay. As I interpreted the nurse's instructions for setting up the drip, I could not help but notice the vulnerability of the patient, who had a thin and frail physique. The patient seemed grateful for my presence, so I settled into a chair in the corner and waited patiently.Soon, the patient drifted off to sleep, and I checked on them every now and again to make sure they were fine. The room became quiet, and I hoped the patient would not be disturbed by the sound of an ambulance or another patient seeking treatment. Although they were in capable hands, I found myself standing guard, metaphorically speaking. During the two hours it took for the drip to finish, I reflected on the emotions growing within me.It suddenly dawned on me: I had not been there for my own father during his battle with cancer. I felt obligated to stay by the patient's side as if fulfilling a debt owed for my absence at that important time. Offering companionship to the patient was the very least I could do.Working as medical interpreters and interacting with patients in varied life and health circumstances will expose us to a wide range of emotions. As we gain experience, helping patients teaches us humility and cultivates a stronger sense of empathy. Although not explicitly outlined in the standards of practice, we have the choice to utilize the powerful virtues of compassion and kindness to positively impact the life of a struggling patient. However, we also run the risk of becoming emotionally detached and losing the ability to act with compassion over time.Alongside my on-site commitments, I also work remotely for an organization managing a high volume of calls in numerous languages. In this role, medical consultations occur via phone or video. This environment can make you feel somewhat isolated, reminiscent of working in a call center where strict protocols dictate the ways calls begin and end. In this setting, I am exposed to slightly different emotional challenges. Shielded by a screen and physical distance, I often feel disconnected when interpreting, even for highly emotional situations.Yet, some interactions are hard to forget. I vividly remember a recent call during which I had to interpret for a victim of sexual assault. I felt deeply moved by their distraught voice and frightening details. For me, as an interpreter, the challenge became even more difficult as it was unreasonable to request the other party articulate their thoughts in short segments for effective communication. To keep up with the speaker, I had to jump into simultaneous interpreting, which many interpreters, including myself, find difficult. At the same time, I was slowed down by the police officer taking meticulous notes. I sympathized with the speaker but was also becoming impatient and angry with myself for experiencing these conflicting emotions. I wanted this call to end as soon as possible because it was... (shrink)

Book synopsis: Assisted reproduction challenges and reinforces traditional understandings of family, kinship and identity. Sperm, egg and embryo donation and surrogacy raise questions about relatedness for parents, children and others involved in creating and raising a child. How socially, morally or psychologically significant is a genetic link between a donor-conceived child and their donor? What should children born through assisted reproduction be told about their origins? Does it matter if a parent is genetically unrelated to their child? How do experiences (...) differ for men and women using collaborative reproduction in heterosexual or same-sex couples, single parent families or co-parenting arrangements? What impact does the wider cultural, socio-legal and regulatory context have? In this multidisciplinary book, an international team of academics and clinicians bring together new empirical research and social science, legal and bioethical perspectives to explore the key issue of relatedness in assisted reproduction. (shrink)

In a widely discussed forthcoming article, “What you can't expect when you're expecting,” L. A. Paul challenges culturally and philosophically traditional views about how to rationally make major life-decisions, most specifically the decision of whether to have children. The present paper argues that because major life-decisions are transformative, the only rational way to approach them is to become resilient people: people who do not “over-plan” their lives or expect their lives to play out “according to plan”—people who understand that beyond (...) a certain limit, life cannot be rationally planned and must be accepted as it comes. I show that this focus on resilience—on self-mastery—stands in direct opposition to culturally dominant attitudes toward decision-making, which focus not on the self-mastery but on control and mastery over one's surroundings. In short, I argue that if Paul's general point about transformative experiences is correct, it follows that we rationally ought to adopt a very different approach to life choices, self-development, and the moral education of our children than currently-dominant cultural norms and practices suggest. (shrink)

There are good reasons to think that mothers love their children, and love them for who they are. There are also good reasons to think that contingent events can decisively influence who one becomes. This entails, I argue, that your mother does not love you for who you are.

Background and objectives: Physicians are exposed to matters of existential character at work, but little is known about the personal impact of such issues. Methods: To explore how physicians experience and cope with existential aspects of their clinical work and how such experiences affect their professional identities, a qualitative study using individual semistructured interviews has analysed accounts of their experiences related to coping with such challenges. Analysis was by systematic text condensation. The purposeful sample comprised 10 physicians (including three (...) women), aged 33–66 years, residents or specialists in cardiology or cardiothoracic surgery, working in a university hospital with 24-hour emergency service and one general practitioner. Results: Participants described a process by which they were able to develop a capacity for coping with the existential challenges at work. After episodes perceived as shocking or horrible earlier in their career, they at present said that they could deal with death and mostly keep it at a distance. Vulnerability was closely linked to professional responsibility and identity, perceived as a burden to be handled. These demands were balanced by an experience of meaning related to their job, connected to making a difference in their patients’ lives. Belonging to a community of their fellows was a presupposition for coping with the loneliness and powerlessness related to their vulnerable professional position. Conclusions: Physicians’ vulnerability facing life and death has been underestimated. Belonging to caring communities may assist growth and coping on exposure to existential aspects of clinical work and developing a professional identity. (shrink)

IntroductionIn May 2006, the small group of doctoral students working on ecophilosophy at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at K.U.Leuven invited the Dutch environmental philosopher Martin Drenthen to a workshop to discuss his writings on the concept of wilderness, its metaphysical and moral meaning, and the challenge social constructivism poses for ecophilosophy and environmental protection. Drenthen’s publications on these topics had already been the subject of intense discussions in the months preceding the workshop. His presentation on the workshop and the (...) three critical responses by Wim Bollen, Glenn Deliège, and Richard Kover are published here in a thoroughly revised form on the basis of further and ongoing discussions about the issues involved. Three further contributions to the discussion are added: one by Nathan Edward Kowalski, a young Canadian philosopher who studied in Leuven and wrote his as yet unpublished dissertation on “Evil in Nature,” a second one by Kingsley Goodwin who is currently writing a dissertation on deep ecology at University College in Dublin and, finally, my own unsystematic thoughts inspired by Martin Drenthen’s provocative and stimulating hermeneutics of our postmodern understanding of nature and wilderness, as well as the diverse critical responses to Drenthen’s views by the other contributors. I owe gratitude to all of them for enriching my own ecophilosophical thought and enlarging its horizon although as my fragmentary reflections show at the cost of yet greater uncertainty and more questions about the possibilities of arguing for a radical environmentalist position. Such a position would somehow connect or ground our moral obligation to preserve genuine non-human otherness, wild and free nature, in the non-human meaning of such nature and in our essential need to be in direct and concrete contact with that field of wild non-human meaning because we ourselves belong to nature, because we are not only and purely civilized but are also and most fundamentally wild and free. Three fundamental questions need to be distinguished: the question about our moral obligations regarding nature and its preservation, the metaphysical question about the nature of nature or the meaning of nature, and the question of the metaphysical grounding of our morals in general, and of our moral obligation regarding nature in particular, in the nature or meaning of nature. The complex intertwinement between these three questions is at the heart of Martin Drenthen’s reflections.The authors contributing to the present discussion approach the various issues from markedly different philosophical backgrounds and concerns: critical theory, anthropology, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deep ecology are all to some degree or other brought to bear on the question of what wilderness means for us, why we are fascinated by it and what it actually and in the first place is.Another interesting difference between the five respondents to Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy relates to the place from which they write: while the Canadians Richard Kover and Nathan Edward Kowalski have wilderness of some sort still close at hand, the Belgians Wim Bollen and Glenn Deliège write from a place which has been thoroughly domesticated, cultivated, and industrialised for a long time. Martin Drenthen himself, of course, writes from the same kind of place as these last two, which explains why he only refers to the wilderness that he has read about in novels, seen in movies, or experienced as recreated in the reserves of the Netherlands. The Irish Kingsley Goodwin writes perhaps from a third, intermediate place that is not wild anymore but still much more natural than Belgium or the Netherlands are.The differences in philosophical approach and concern combined with the difference of place generate a rich tapestry of perspectives and voices wrestling with the fundamental questions of our perceived homelessness and alienation from nature, our cultural discontent, our longing for and need for radical alterity, of immanence and transcendence, of who we are and where we belong, and more concretely of whether there is more to ground our efforts to preserve nature than enlightened self-interest and subjective preference. Martin Drenthen deserves praise for inaugurating this fruitful discussion with his intriguing and highly paradoxical effort to hybridize a postmodern deconstruction of the idea and ideal of wilderness as unspoilt and true nature on the one hand with a new metaphysics of wilderness on the other. Arne Naess, who is generally regarded as the founding father of deep ecology, pointed out the positive and stimulating role that vagueness in the expression of ideas can play in political and philosophical debate. Such general and vague but highly suggestive expressions as ‘all life is one’ are not empty at all, as is often claimed; they are rather full of possibilities of ‘precisation’ and differentiation. Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy is certainly not vague to the degree of ‘all life is one,’ but his expositions are similarly pregnant with a wealth of further questions, precisations, distinctions, and conceptual clarifications. Good examples of different kinds are to be found in the contributions of Nathan Edward Kowalski and Richard Kover. Kowalski points out that Drenthen’s notions of culture and wilderness need to be made more precise by distinguishing them from the notions of civilization and wildness such that wild cultures become a conceptual possibility. Richard Kover takes the lead from Drenthen’s question about the reason for our postmodern fascination for wilderness to confront it with our primordial fascination in terms of the dependence in the evolution of our subjectivity and our consciousness on the focused perceptual attention on wild forms.Glenn Deliège situates Martin Drenthen’s wilderness-philosophy in its original context of the Dutch debate on the preservation of nature, in particular on the new wilderness paradigm. According to this paradigm, the nature to be preserved should be true and pure, truly natural and wild nature, that is nature outside of and free from the cultivating and domesticating influence of humans. In the Netherlands, however, such nature no longer exists; it can only be preserved after it has first been artificially recreated. Deliège gives an informative summary account of the highly charged three-cornered debate between the adepts of this wilderness-paradigm, the proponents of the more traditional form of conservation of remnants of the typical European landscapes created by pre-industrial farming practices and the modern technocratic functionalists. This debate makes obvious that there are quite different views of the nature of nature and its value. Enter social constructivism: the contested nature of nature is nothing more than a social construct, an idea in a collective mind. The contestation itself is a struggle for authority and power between different such social constructs, any claim to scientific objectivity and objective truth for one’s image of nature is an arrogation of a truth which doesn’t exist and is potentially oppressive by silencing other views. Nature then is up for the grabs of politics, political negotiation, and compromise between various interest groups who all want to get some benefit from nature, some use-value.The problem with Drenthen’s effort to articulate a normative concept of nature which cannot be deconstructed in this way is the extreme formality and emptiness of his metaphysical concept of wilderness as that which is always ‘beyond’, always ‘more’ and which can never be exhausted by any image and construction of nature. Any more concrete determination is mere appearance; the thing in itself is a border concept of that which in fact cannot be grasped conceptually. Glenn Deliège is critical of this formality and emptiness from which it will be impossible to derive any concrete guidance for our conservation practices. He then goes on to defend the Arcadian tradition of our appreciation of nature as giving us a historically well-grounded orientation for those practices. Of course that Arcadian tradition is obviously a cultural construction but that doesn’t make it completely arbitrary and contingent since it is itself ultimately grounded in and open to modification by our concrete sensuous experiences of nature.Deliège here raises the very important issue of the relation between our concrete perceptual and bodily experiences in and with nature and our concepts and metaphysical images of nature. Drenthen himself approaches this issue from the hermeneutical perspective of our need to make sense of our experiences and to articulate their meaning. His confrontation with social constructivism and his effort to salvage something from its relativizing acid lead him, however, into the direction of a highly abstract and empty concept of wilderness.Richard Kover shows that perception is, indeed, the key to a radical critique of social constructivism. He does this with the help of the ecological anthropology of Paul Shepard, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It needs to be said here that Kover takes his leave from an unpublished paper by Martin Drenthen with the title “How to appropriate wilderness appropriately?” – the paper is accessible though on Drenthen’s web-site - in which Drenthen comments and reflects upon three contemporary wilderness-tales, one of them being Werner Herzog’s much-discussed documentary on Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist drop-out who lived thirteen summers among wild grizzlies in the Alaskan wilderness before being killed together with his girlfriend by a grizzly bear.Kover tries to show that we are not imprisoned in the mirror-cabinet of our mind or of our human sociality. To make his case, he starts from Paul Shepard’s thoughtful observation that the evolutionary emergence of the mind did not remove us from the natural world but actually connected us deeper with it. Through our mind we evolved more fully into it because our mind is primordially in our senses and in the ability to articulate a perceptual world. The natural world in the form of the system of natural species and their relations is the primary model for perceptual discriminations, for the fundamental discovery of order with its twin-aspects of distinction and discontinuity on the one side and relations and continuity on the other side. Our cognition is essentially perceptually based, our subjectivity is primordially informed by our inherence in the sensible world. Perceptual cognition is inherently intentional and relational, it is not an autonomous mental construction, it is rather in the world and informed by that which is perceived. The other is always intertwined with the subject. We are always already hooked up with the world, with the others, before we start reflecting, thinking, and conceptualizing. This is one of the major themes in Shepard’s work: what this insight means with regard to our relations to non-human otherness, in particular to our perceptual encounter with wild animals. In our encounter with non-human otherness, we are confronted with an essentially ambiguous sense of both affinity and disjuncture. Wild animals demonstrate to us that we are not homeless or alien to this world, that we fundamentally belong to it and are part of it. Their difference, however, shows us that there are different perspectives and ways of being in the world. “Thus the encounter with non-human others inform humans that we are both of the world and simultaneously not the world and there are horizons of significance beyond our own perspective.”Nathan Edward Kowalski comes to a similar conclusion when he situates our morality in the larger moral order of wild nature. According to Kowalski it is indeed a moral order though not our own, an Other to our morality but not simply a negative one. It is, as Drenthen says, a highly paradoxical amoral morality. But what can it mean to speak of morality here? For Kowalski it means that the issue is not merely the theoretical recognition and acknowledgment of axiological transcendence, of non-human values out there, but whether we will appropriately conform to and comport ourselves towards that axiological transcendence so that we can find a human homeland in wild nature instead of turning it into a wasteland. The question then is, how to fit our own human morality into this larger order and greater reality, to subordinate it to that greater reality as a part of it and encompassed but not denied by it so that we can be moral and natural at the same time, tender carnivores hunting the sacred game. Indigenous people follow a moral protocol in their relationship with non-human others which acknowledge and respects their autonomy, their alterity, and the sacred mystery of their different ways of being. They are not befriended but some of them are hunted and eaten – as an exchange in the gift-economy of nature.The problem of the homelessness and alienation from nature is discussed by Wim Bollen from the radically different vantage point of critical theory. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the human story unfolds as a tragic effort to liberate ourselves from nature and to become fully human through rational control when in the end this effort turns against ourselves and instead of liberation and human flourishing we get social domination and repression of our natural needs. The frustrations and mutilations imposed upon us by a repressive civilization give rise to the regressive desire for a return to a natural existence. Referring to the myth of Odysseus and Circe as interpreted by Adorno and Horkheimer, Wim Bollen equates such a natural existence with animal life. In the light of contemporary knowledge about primitive existence, however, this equation is highly problematic. Palaeolithic foragers were already fully human in all respects. A life without civilization need not be an animal-existence.According to Adorno/Horkheimer, our subjectivity and autonomy have to be wrested from animal-nature through an exertive struggle that cannot but proceed by a threefold strategy of domination: the domination of non-human otherness, of human others, and of our own inner nature. The siren song of nature consists in the temptation to give up that struggle for the promise of an unreflective, non-alienated natural existence without toil.When Odysseus’ men give in to Circe’s seduction they are, however, not transformed into wild animals but into swine. According to Bollen this signifies that we cannot re-wild ourselves, that we remain imprisoned in civilization, either as master-subjects or as domesticated animals. Bollen, by the way, like Drenthen, does not distinguish conceptually between civilization and culture. Since re-wilding for Bollen means the impossibility of returning to animal-existence, which is actually the impossibility of becoming another species since biologically we are animals already, to be imprisoned in civilisation means nothing else than to be imprisoned in our humanity. The fact that we cannot become wild animals again – according to Paul Shepard, however, we are still wild animals – is indeed, as Bollen stresses, a trivial form of alienation. A more meaningful concept of alienation which can be put to critical use must refer to a culturally and historically determined frustration and deficit inside the cultural order that is to be overcome not by an impossible regression but by progressive politics leading beyond the three intertwined forms of domination. Not back to nature but forward towards a reconciliation of culture with nature! Such a reconciliation would neither collapse culture into the immanence of nature nor submerge nature into the transcendence of culture. According with the three forms of domination it would be a three-dimensional form of reconciliation.Odysseus’ men did not got what they thought were promised them: the complete liberation from the burden of being autonomous subjects, of being civilized, but they got something worthwhile, namely a certain from of pleasure, a limited and provisional relief and escape. Bollen sees a critical potential in these piggish pleasures after all and consequently even in the siren song of nature since these pleasures were only experienced because Odysseus’ men gave in to it. But one has to give in to this siren song critically if it is to unfold its liberating potential. The problem with pleasure though in bourgeois society is that it is necessarily betrayed, instrumentalized and sold.Kingsley Goodwin’s paper starts by defending deep ecology against the charge of asserting a naïve and dogmatic metaphysics of nature. For convenience sake, but not quite unproblematically, he identifies deep ecology with the environmental thought of Arne Naess. A metaphysics of nature for Naess is always part of a personal worldview. Worldviews which are partly inspired by ecology Naess calls ecosophies. Naess always stresses the personal character of such a worldview and the irreducible plurality of them. It used to be a common misunderstanding of the platform of deep ecology which Naess conceived together with George Sessions that it expressed in a condensed form the metaphysical beliefs of deep ecology. Naess’ intention, however, was to try to articulate in a general fashion the basic viewpoints on which the supporters of the deep ecology movement agreed. It would be possible then to derive these viewpoints from quite different worldviews. In light of this, I think, that Goodwin’s characterisation of the platform as “pragmatic and activist” is not quite appropriate.Goodwin goes on to compare Drenthen’s conception of wilderness and wildness with the similar position developed by Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature. He like Naess in his personal ecosophy stresses the crucial role of perceptual experience of wild otherness to find an antidote to the relativity and contingency of our interpretations of nature. Evernden refers to studies on child development to argue for a non-dualistic and relational conception of the self, similar to Naess’ relational ontology. According to Goodwin, Drenthen, in spite of his hermeneutical approach remains too much indebted to the Western subject/object-dualism. The object, in this case wild nature, is pure otherness.With regard to a compost heap, Goodwin shows that we are not separated from nature by an inseparable gulf, that nature is close at hand, and that we can experience and explore it, appreciate the complex play of identity and difference it consists of, the exchanges and transformations and that we can identify with the organisms involved in these exchanges.*The proceeding remarks only highlight some of the prominent themes and considerations in the various contributions to this topical issue of Ethical Perspectives. Hopefully the reader will feel invited and enticed to read the articles themselves, starting, preferably of course, with the essay by Martin Drenthen, who sparked off this lively discussion on the moral meaning of wild nature. I am honoured and pleased to be able to introduce these rich explorations by such talented young environmental philosophers who are eager to develop environmental philosophy further and lead it into new directions. They all have to wrestle with and find answers to the challenge postmodern deconstruction and social constructivism pose for environmental philosophy. In the face of that challenge, it is even more difficult than it already was to provide solid and convincing arguments for the defence of wild and free nature beyond merely pragmatic arguments in terms of its utilitarian value for us. The reason for that defence is not clear-cut and proves to be just as evasive as the moral meaning of nature itself. But neither that reason nor that meaning are mere phantoms and mirages that vanish when we approach them and try to grasp them. They are more substantial, even if they will never have the solidity of a mathematical proof or a scientific measurement. Their locale is the lifeworld which from the point of view of scientific and logical precision and clarity is a messy place where subject and object, reason and heart, fact and value, experience and thought and, yes, nature and culture cannot be clearly separated. This has important consequences for environmental philosophy and its methodology. Conceptual analysis and logical argumentation have to become sensitive to the richness of experience in the lifeworld and to the diverse efforts of its articulation: i.e., they have to open themselves up and maybe even to subordinate themselves to phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. For me personally this is one of the most important conclusions I draw from the discussion presented here. (shrink)

This article investigates the notion of spiritual appropriation in Finnish schools, with a particular focus on the experiences of religious minorities. It draws on narratives from these communities, shedding light on their daily experiences in the educational setting. Employing counter-storytelling from critical race theory (CRT), the research examines the power dynamics and the impact of epistemological privileges within Finnish schools. The study unveils a unique form of spiritual appropriation in the school setting, termed ‘fraudulent appropriation’. Here, adults from the majority (...) group assume the authority to teach and interpret minority religious traditions, often providing distorted or false information to minority children, and even utilizing their religion as a tool for control. Furthermore, the narratives underscore the significance of agency and self-representation for minority groups. When minorities are able to vocalize their presence in schools through creative events, the act of appropriation can be mitigated, paving the way for appreciation. This serves as a means to counter dominant narratives while fostering a sense of belonging and respect. In conclusion, the article emphasizes the importance of amplifying the voices of minorities and promoting appreciation over appropriation. It advocates the visibility, audibility and self-determination of minority groups. The article also posits that the term ‘fraudulent appropriation’ is valuable for the investigation of structures that perpetuate the exclusion and oppression of religious-minority children in schools. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Inheriting Identity and Practicing TransformationThe Time of Feminist PoliticsShannon HoffA human life unfolds over time. No moment of it can be considered apart from the others, independently of the fact that the human being was and will be, and so no moment is sufficient on its own to tell us of the nature of that identity. Each moment is insufficient as an expression of who we are, as an (...) answer to the question of what we want to be, or as a point at which a full account of our identity could be given. And we live each moment as if afflicted by a dual blindness with regard to the past and future that lend it significance; while exercising pervasive influence in the present, this past and future are relatively inaccessible to our reflective insight. We are always “growing up,” so to speak, from out of a childhood that can never be the purely transparent object of reflection, to an adulthood or “accomplishment” of identity that is always in the mysterious future, unimaginable in the terms of the adolescence in which we find ourselves.My purpose here is to show how this issue resonates in the context of feminist philosophy, feminist critique, and feminist practice—that is, how a consideration of time and its impact on human experience allows us to highlight the accomplishments of various avenues of feminist thought, to elaborate their shortcomings in relation to each other, to perceive the reasons behind the tensions among them, and to understand the way in which they are (and should [End Page 167] be understood as) connected. I will work through the issue of what it means to live in the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future—what it means to inherit an already meaningful world, to be an individual in the present, and to be propelled into an uncertain future—so as to provide a general framework by which to interpret the history of feminist thought. I will explain these different temporal dimensions in terms of the (respective) ideas of cultivation, universality, and transformation, identifying the positive and negative significance of each and also the demand that the tensions among them be negotiated. Finally, I will show that feminist justice is in fact found here, as answerability to all three—to communities of cultivation, to the demands of universality, and to the inconclusiveness and transformability of human identity. While much feminist thinking has been committed to exploring these elements singly, in abstraction from the others, and while such work is important, it is also valuable to explicitly explore the relationships and tensions among these different aspects, to articulate how to act and think in light of this underlying conceptual context, and to do so in a more explicit and self-conscious way.There is, of course, a disadvantage to not exploring these elements on their own terms: namely, that one handles their subtleties roughly. A further and related danger is that involved in trying to draw a broad picture of a tradition with complex and conflicting elements, one that does not count itself as a tradition at times—as a “we,” a feminism, or a feminist thought.1 While I will talk about “feminism” or “feminist thought,” I do not presume that these differences do not exist; my goal is simply to explore what is involved in an elaboration of a critical interpretation of society, when the society one critically interprets is an agent in one’s formation. The description of the dynamics of human becoming, agency, and critique I develop below has the purpose of showing that it is possible to understand differences between feminist positions as complementary, a process that will lead me to underemphasize stringent divisions and charged oppositions and to focus on drawing connections. Let us turn now to a preliminary description of the conceptual framework I seek to construct.Feminism and TimeTo advance feminist purposes is, one might presume, to hope for and work toward a new and transformed reality in the future. It would seem, however, that this reality cannot be clearly envisioned in the present, since that would require the transformation of the very people envisioning it. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:VIOLENCE AS INSTITUTION IN AFRICAN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A CASE STUDY OF RWANDA Malachie Munyaneza UnitedReform Church, London I. Introduction Violence is a phenomenon. It is multidimensional and multifarious. It is physical, geographical, spiritual, psychological, sudden or latent. It is metaphysical, because for some religious beliefs, it involves the deed-consequences scheme in terms of rewards and punishments, even beyond this world into the otherworldly life. It is an instrument (...) used in one's own life (suicide), in the simple family, in the small-scale societies, as well as in the multi-ethnic social settings. It can be a national, multinational and universal phenomenon. It presents some contradictions, because, though it is abhorred in general, some individuals or states use it as a means to achieve ultimate good or misuse it for their own selfish interests. It becomes more of a repulsive mystery when it is seen as institutional and integral partofreligionwhich fundamentallyshould avoid it. Between April and July 1994, the media ofthe world brought images ofthe mostviolent episode ofRwandan history into the living rooms ofthis planet's population. The magnitude ofthe genocide of 1994 was unprecedented in this century. Up to one million of people are estimated to have been killed within only one hundred days. It is difficult to understand the magnitude ofthis violence. Tribal conflicts in Rwanda, colonial powers, political manipulations and economic problems alone are not enough to explain whathas happened. Political analysts, sociologists, anthropologists have tried to understand whetherthe political instability ofthe late 80s, the malfunction of political institutions, the October War (1990-94) and the 40Malachie Munyaneza consequent war atrocities could have necessarily culminated in the genocide the world witnessed. Fundamental questions about the whole philosophy oflife and religion in the history ofRwandaand its relationship to violence are to be addressed too, because they touch the inner being of the outward physical person. People have the right to know what has gone wrong all along in all areas of their life. This paper will try to look at religious beliefs and violence as institution in ancient and modern Rwanda in its magico-religious context and its implications in the social structure. As I am only a debutante Girardian, I will discuss only the key terms ofhis theory—mimesis, desire and scapegoating—as they guide my reflections.?. Religious beliefs and violence Generally, Rwanda is viewed as a monotheistic country. All Rwandan ethnic groups believed in the only one heavenly Superior Being called Imana. Though Rwandansrecognized Imanaasthe SupremeBeing, Creator and Sustainer ofall life, they did not have a special service ofworship to him at a central place. They thought it was temerity to try and please or influence God because ifyou try you would not find enough to match his greatness and his merits. A Rwandan saying tells that you cannot handle God because ifyoutryyou would paydearly.1 Imana is the Ancientofdays as it is expressed in the name "Habiyakare"(He is before the first dawn). He is all-knowing as in the name "Bizimana" (they [all things] are known by God). He rules over everything as King, Judge and Master as expressed in the name "Hategekimana" (everywhere it is God who rules). Unfortunately Rwandans believedthatwhatever befell them was pre-ordained by God and most ofthe time fatalism dominated their lives. They confronted violence or fate with resignation thinking that the origin is in God's will or from angry spirits they did not control. Rwandans also believe in the existence ofa spiritual realm. The spirits of the dead lived further and roamed about. They would come back to trouble their relatives, especially when they felt some duties due to them were neglected. They could even kill through sickness, insanity or provoke infertility. They hold people under the siege ofconstant mental terror. The spirits most feared were the ones from those who had died in unfortunate 1St Paul expressed the same idea in his discourse at Athens and said: "The god who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by the human hands, as ifhe need anything..." (Acts 1 7, 24-25). Violence as Institution in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Fifth Stasimon of Euripides' MedeaCharles SegalAmong the lyrics of extant Greek tragedy several passages of Euripides are remarkable for the effects of pathos achieved by introducing children. In Alcestis the children of the protagonists appear unexpectedly on the stage and sing a strophic lament over their dead mother, punctuated by two trimeters of Admetus sharing their grief (392-415). Suppliants presents an even longer and more complex (...) choral lament as Euadne's now orphaned children join with the chorus in a commatic, antiphonal thrēnos for their mother (1123-64).1 Their appearance not only adds to the sudden flurry of new characters when the play is already nearing its end (Euadne enters at 990 and her father Iphis at 1034) but also fills out the panorama of lament at the end of the play: children and a father lament over a mother and a daughter who chose a heroic death, and the Argive children, thanks to Theseus, can lament over the bodies of their slain warrior fathers (Supp. 1114-75). The parallelism helps emphasize the heroism of Euadne, one of several self-sacrificing women in these so-called political plays.Euripides obtains another kind of pathos by the offstage cries of Medea's children at the moment of their murder. In an initial strophe and antistrophe the chorus of Corinthian women expresses its horror at the imminent slaughter and speculates on its supernatural causes (an Erinys in the house, 1258-60) and also on its human motivations (Medea's [End Page 167] rage, 1265-67). There follows a cry from within the house, indicated by μοι, which a third century B.C. papyrus fragment has now restored to the text.2 In the ensuing exchange the chorus sings in dochmiacs while the children cry out in iambic trimeters from within the house (1270a-81):Child (within). Alas for me.Chorus. Do you hear, do you hear the children's shouting? Alas, miserable woman, ill-starred.Child A. Alas, what shall I do? Where shall I flee my mother's hands?Child B. I know not, dearest brother; for we are being destroyed.Chorus. Shall I enter the house? I am decided to ward off murder from the children.Child A. Yes, in the gods' name, help; for we stand in need.Child B. How close we are to the snares of the sword.Chorus. Wretched woman, truly then you are rock or iron, you who will kill with a doom from your own hands the fruit of children that you bore!The audience, we must recall, can have only a vague idea about how the children would die, for Euripides seems to be the first poet to [End Page 168] make Medea kill them intentionally.3 The chorus began their previous ode, the fourth stasimon, by abandoning hope for the children's lives (, 976-77: "Now no longer do I have any hope of the children's lives, no longer; for they are already going to their murder"). Despite Medea's impulses of love and pity in the celebrated speech of inner struggle that follows this ode (1040-80), we experience the increasing inevitability of the children's deaths, especially after the news of Creon's and the Princess' deaths (cf. 1236-41). In contrast to her earlier hesitation, when she addressed her thumos with a plea not to do the deed (1056), Medea now, just before the fifth stasimon, addresses heart and hand to steel themselves for the final step of her revenge. Although Medea is now irrevocably committed to the murder, her speech nevertheless marks another moment of deep tragic division between maternity and vengefulness (1244-50):4Come, my wretched hand, take the sword, take it, and go toward the painful goal of your life, and do not yield to cowardice or remember how dear are the children, how you gave them birth, but for this short day forget your children, and then utter your lament. For if you kill them, yet they are dear. Unfortunate woman that I am.5When the chorus, in the ode that follows these lines, prays to Earth and Helios, it brings us closer to a vision... (shrink)

During the spring of 1983 I began my third semester in college giving serious consideration to the thought of becoming a philosophy major. I had taken a few courses and found the subject intriguing. More influential in my own considerations was the fact that I had recently converted to Christianity and had been encouraged by some early mentors in the faith to read the works of various Christian philosophers both contemporary and classical. One evening that semester I was studying for (...) an upcoming exam when a friend, “John,” came to the door. From the look on his face I knew he was after something, what I wasn’t sure. I had known John since arriving at college, having met him at the Christian Fellowship meetings on campus. John had grown up in a devoutly Christian home and had cultivated a deep love for and devotion to his faith. However, he had struggled academically and was especially troubled by the fact that his faith seemed to have little amicable contact with the view of the world set forth by his admittedly unsympathetic professors. John began telling me about his professor for his introductory philosophy class who was, in his estimation, “leaning on” the theists in the class. He felt that every move in the course was calculated to reinforce the confidence of the atheist at the theist’s expense. At the end of the most recent lecture the professor punctuated the class as he had each semester, by offering a challenge to his students: “If you can find anyone who is willing to come to offer a philosophical defense of theism,” he mocked, “I will give them an entire class to do so.” Upon hearing the quote, I feared John was going to ask just what he proceeded to ask: “Would you try it.” Not surprisingly, I thought it unwise for someone with the full experience of one semester of philosophy under his belt to challenge a professor of nearly twenty years. Not to mention the fact that the one I would have to confront would likely be determining my future academic fate as one of my major professors.. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of xiao 孝, often translated as filial piety or familial deference, which is compatible with Bernard Williams’s insistence that ethical deliberation should be indeterminate and open-ended, rather than pre-established on the basis of one’s social relationships. Through a critical reading of Williams’s account of ethical knowledge localized to an advisor model, I suggest that we trust those who share similar experiences in social relationships to offer advice specific to our social roles. This trust exhibits itself (...) as xiao, which amounts to no more than the deference children have towards their parents as their guides on the ethical question of how we ought to live—‘we’, as individuals who share common experiences of being children, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, and other such social roles. (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. `Wise (...) Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

You've been looking for Jesus. At one time or another you have likely felt conflicted by two opposing desires: the longing to be truly seen and known, versus the drive to hide from real intimacy. This universal human experience points to one simple truth - we want to be loved, but are ashamed of our unworthiness. Only one Person could ever meet you in this dilemma, seeing your darkest secrets without flinching, offering the power to change, and loving you (...) without an agenda. This Person is Jesus. Before meeting Jesus, Ken Williams describes himself as a homosexual who was tormented by shame and on the brink of committing suicide. But in the person of Jesus, Ken discovered the affirmation, love, and wholeness he had been seeking. Since then, Ken has worked tirelessly to help others experience the same hope he found. Today, his life's work is to cultivate a productive and compassionate environment for those bound by sexual shame, insecurity, and fear, so that they can thrive in righteousness, peace and joy! In The Journey Out​, Ken Williams will... Reveal that change and freedom from same sex attraction are possible Demystify homosexuality and gender identity issues Help you to make a deep, authentic connection with Jesus Offer wisdom for supporters: parents, family, friends, or pastors If you are longing to be deeply known and unconditionally loved, your heart is crying out for Jesus. You will meet Him in the pages of The Journey Out, and discover a new life filled with true hope and enduring joy! (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Mother's Love"Katie L. GholsonWho is going to teach my daughter about becoming a woman?" S said to me. S was 38 and diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She and her husband were high school sweethearts, and she had a young son and a daughter. She had been told that there was no cure for her cancer, and at the point of meeting her, very little was able to be (...) done to manage her symptoms.As a mother of a young daughter, I was humbled by the question she asked me. Her daughter was 12 and was just beginning to learn about becoming a woman. The anticipatory grief of not having the opportunities to care for one's own children in the crucial moments of their development was devastating to S. Her ability to name what she grieves the most was profoundly sad to me and the other team members who witnessed it.As a palliative care chaplain, I am used to sad and tragic cases, but this one felt different. S and I had [End Page 80] a lot in common. I am also 38, married to my high school sweetheart, and I have a son and a daughter. Of course, it was not just these reasons that I felt a connection to S. It was also the tangible despair I felt when I was with her. As a chaplain, I am trained to meet people where they are and not to hurry them from a place of despair and anguish. I visited with S nine different times and watched the progression of her existential distress. Her distress was not always linear. Some days, it took a backseat and other days, it was front and center, but I was there to be a witness to whatever she was thinking and feeling, and a lot of times, it was inexpressible grief.S did not want to meet with "palliative care" initially. She was terrified of her diagnosis and believed that there were treatments that would give her back the life she desired. She was fierce and determined. S was also religious and believed that there was a miraculous cure for her that would allow her the time she desired to spend with her children and her husband. S was a softball mom and loved to watch her daughter play. While in the hospital, she missed many games, and this weighed on her.Along with being an athlete, S's daughter was very artistic and made S a bouquet of paper flowers. Each flower contained an encouraging phrase. S opened one while I was in her room. She had lost her hair, much of her body weight, and was wearing a hospital gown, but when she opened the flower, her daughter had written, "You are beautiful, Mom." In that moment, two 38-year-old women understood that beauty transcends outward appearances. S was beautiful: her story, her life, and her courage.S loved to walk around the hallway of her unit. I think she felt if she could keep moving, she could stay alive. She was able to take a walk outside a few times while she was inpatient and getting fresh air was very positive to her. These walks not only gave her the ability to widen her environmental space, but they also gave her space to think and consider the difficult situation she was faced with. I accompanied her on one of her walks. It was while we walked next to each other that she was able to finally share with me that she was afraid. She told me that the fear of not getting home, and the fear of death was overwhelming. I find that sometimes people can be vulnerable when they are not feeling interrogated by a medical team staring at them as they lay in a hospital bed. The "normal" activity of taking a walk and being side-by-side humanized the experience and I think S felt that at that moment, she could talk to me human-to-human—like friend-to-friend.When S finally decided to go home on hospice, I collected some legacy project supplies. I went to the hospital... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Humans and the World: From the Perspective of Affairs by Yang GuorongHuanyou Li1 (bio)Ren yu Shijie: Yi Shi Guanzhi 人與世界：以事观之 (Humans and the World: From the Perspective of Affairs). By Yang Guorong 杨国荣. Beijing: Sanlian Press, 2021. Pp. xii+ 289. Paperback RMB55, isbn 9787108071217.Yang Guorong is not only a prominent scholar specializing in Chinese philosophy, but also a contemporary Chinese philosopher who has devoted himself to creating his (...) own philosophical system known as "concrete metaphysics" (juti xingershangxue 具体形而上学). In Humans and the World: From the Perspective of Affairs (hereafter Humans and the World), Yang delves into his philosophical system, with a primary focus on affairs (shi 事), which he sees as an embodiment of his ideas.According to Yang, "affairs" refers to actual human activities, encompassing both the act of "doing affairs" (zuoshi 作事) and its results. In essence, "affairs" or "doing affairs" represent humans' engagement in understanding and transforming the world while also striving for self-realization. "From the perspective of affairs" entails understanding humans and the world, as well as their correlation, in a primitive and fundamental manner. Yang aims to achieve the unification of "that which is antecedent to the material form" (xingershang 形而上) and "that which is subsequent to the material form" (xingerxia 形而下), which serves as the central theme and objective of his philosophical system.Humans and the World has six chapters in total. In Chapter 1, the author elucidates the intricate relationship between affairs and the actual world. From his perspective, the emergence of the actual world is rooted in the process of human activities that involve transforming things (wu 物) (p. 29). Thus, this chapter primarily delves into the distinction between things and affairs. Yang draws upon and examines various pertinent theories, including those from Confucianism, Daoism, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. He argues that things possess their inherent and natural existence (benran cunzai 本然存在), but it is only through affairs that they can actively participate in the becoming of the actual world. Throughout the process of engaging in affairs, humans can grasp the underlying principles of things, which, in turn, continue to exist in manifold forms. Additionally, as these things serve human needs, their significance becomes manifest (pp. 30-42). Hence, doing affairs not only involves [End Page 1] understanding or recognizing things but also entails making value judgements. In the actual world, the unity of fact and value can be achieved through the medium of affairs. When humans are involved in doing affairs, things are no longer confined to their inherent nature or merely existing in themselves. Instead, they are transformed through the concrete and practical actions of humans, contributing to the construction of the actual world. It is through this dynamic interplay between things and humans that the certainty of the actual world is realized (p. 48).Chapter 2 further explores the correlation between human existence and affairs. The author asserts that affairs encompass the entire process of human existence (p. 51). Engaging in affairs involves transforming things, effecting changes in the world, accumulating empirical experiences, cultivating personal virtues, and actualizing social roles. This interplay with affairs reflects the structural manifestation of human existence in diverse forms (pp. 53-64). According to Yang, the concrete significance of human existence lies in the realization of the value of being human, which is to understand and transform the world. This necessitates that humans actively participate in creative activities, which, in essence, means they must be involved in doing affairs. From Yang's perspective, true freedom and fulfillment can only be attained when individuals immerse themselves in concrete affairs, utilizing their essential power and overcoming challenges. By doing so, they will avoid feelings of dullness or emptiness, because the fulfillment of doing affairs requires more than mere personal ability--it involves understanding objective realities and adapting to specific circumstances. Moreover, it demands a positive approach that unifies the principles of righteousness, goodness, and effectiveness. In this manner, humans can successfully navigate their engagement with affairs and realize their potential for freedom and self-fulfillment (pp. 67-69).Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between "being" and "becoming" viewed from the perspective of affairs. Yang examines Whitehead's ideas and argues that the original world (benren shijie 本然世界) experiences change... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 24-42 [Access article in PDF] Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit? C. Fred Alford THE LEVINAS EFFECT it has been called, the ability of Emmanuel Levinas's texts to say anything the reader wants to hear, so that Levinas becomes a deconstructionist, theologian, proto-feminist, or even the reconciler of postmodern ethics and rabbinic Judaism. Talmudic scholar and postmodern philosopher, Levinas has become everything (...) to everyone. Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be described as the language of prophecy, we pretend we understand what he is talking about, writing in much the same style, so as to say whatever we wanted to say in the first place. Even those who disagree with Levinas generally criticize him from within the framework of his project, sharing his assumptions while trying to make Levinas more Levinassian. 1How might one disrupt the Levinas Effect? By disrupt, I mean criticize Levinas sympathetically, from a perspective outside his "system," but not outside his world. Levinas's world is one in which the self is the enemy not only of the other, but of authentic existence. Iris Murdoch shares this view with Levinas. Like Levinas, Murdoch sees the self as the enemy. "Unselfing," as she calls it, is the means; the end is to overcome totality, which means the subjection of the other to my categories and my experience. Levinas means much the same thing by totality. It is his philosophical idée maîtresse, the troubling tendency of Western thought from Plato to Hegel and beyond."What breaks the drive of consciousness to totality is not an appeal to an abstract social or linguistic whole, but an encounter with the concrete other person." Levinas did not say this, nor did Iris Murdoch. Maria Antonaccio says it in a book about Murdoch, in which she compares Murdoch's views to those of Levinas. What they share, says [End Page 24] Antonaccio, is this critique of totality, even if "Murdoch would reject the language of command, lordship and accusation that pervade Levinas's account." 2Certainly Levinas's language of persecution is one of the most striking aspects of his account, and I will not ignore it. But it is not the most important thing that distinguishes him from Murdoch. One might argue that it is the "concrete other person" that distinguishes Levinas from Murdoch, for in many respects the other is an abstraction for Levinas. "The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes!" says Levinas. 3 Only at a distance is the other abstract enough to remind us of infinity.This distinction comes closer to capturing the difference between them. Even more important, Levinas shares Sartre's nausea at the thingyness of the world. Levinas calls it the il y a, the "there is." It is this that makes his account closer to Sartre's than one might imagine, and more distant from Murdoch. This does not, of course, make Levinas wrong. The comparison with Murdoch is a way of getting out from under the Levinas Effect.My goal is to better understand Levinas by comparing him with Murdoch. This requires that Murdoch's philosophy be seriously considered, but perhaps not as seriously as that of Levinas. Murdoch is the other, Levinas the subject. Possibly we will end up understanding the other better than the subject. I The outlines of Levinas's philosophy will be familiar to many readers. I will elaborate upon a story told by Levinas to recount it. 4 Imagine that someone rings your doorbell and disturbs your work. As you walk to the door you are distracted, still thinking about your latest project. It takes you a moment to recognize your neighbor at the door, the one who lives upstairs; as soon as you recognize his face you invite him in. You talk for a while. He tells you his problem, you tell him what you might do to help him. You share some pleasant conversation, and soon enough your neighbor leaves. What you originally experienced... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In, Out Me, You Mental, Moral Where Do I Begin?Mark D. Rego (bio)I once attended a Buddhist meditation retreat, led by an American meditation teacher. The instructor had studied and practiced is Asia for many years and was well versed in the practices and teachings of Buddhism. Among his opening remarks was something along the line of the following: "One question that is asked on every retreat is, 'if (...) there is no true self, then who is it who has come here to become free of the illusion of a self?' The answer is, I don't know, but we can start anyway."This sense of practicality in the face of unanswerable questions is built into Buddhism, as is the relationship among the particularities of each individual, a process akin to externality, mental well-being, and morality.I raise Buddhism both because of its central interest into the nature of the self (an obviously germane consideration in the papers under discussion) and because of this second feature noted, namely the comfortable integration of individuality, character building, ethical action, and mental well-being (the issue of the true self will, thankfully, have to wait). It is this theme that I raise via the discussion of externality.The commentaries of Talmadge and Graham, unintentionally I think, pull me toward a beguiling observation in my daily practice of psychiatry. Namely, patients commonly report their clinical improvements in terms of how they deal better with others, how they are more thoughtful and even handed (with themselves included), and how they better cope with the demands of their individual lives. In senses both highly individual and highly principled, and in ways both explicit and implicit, when patients feel better they often feel that they are better people (all the kinds of treatment mentioned in my paper equally apply; there is no exclusivity in this result).There is also an interesting consistency in a dual manner in which this is expressed. In one way people report the improved coping, handling, and so on mentioned. In the next breath the same person commonly says, "I feel like myself."The meditation instructor would be pleased; it appears that through a process of becoming aware of and letting go of some form of negativity an individual feels better, acts better, and feels more unified. (As the instructor was psychologically sophisticated, he would not mistake the "like myself" sentiment as a Buddhist heresy. Rather, he would understand it as a reflection of being more at ease with and aware of disparate parts of himself.) And all this without figuring out who the real self is. [End Page 331]I mention these observations about Buddhism and clinical care because when I consider the processes of evaluating, deciding, and forging identity and volition it seems to me that somewhere between the lines the individual is aligning himself with some sense of what is good. The resultant experience of volition and cohesive identity is, often but not always, experienced as good both psychologically and morally.Change, Others, and ValuesIn the two commentaries that follow my paper on Frankfurtian externality and therapeutic change (Rego 2004), Talmadge (2004) and Graham (2004) highlight different aspects of externality and therapeutics. Talmadge, an addiction psychiatrist, expands the theme of volitional change in recovery from addiction. For Talmadge, as for most in the field, the question of when and how an addict has truly committed to change (hitting "rock bottom"? accepting the first of the twelve steps?) is perennially in the air. Such knowledge would be invaluable in guiding addicts along their rocky paths.Although still far short of the mark, Talmadge finds some illustrative guidance in Frankfurt. The shift that takes place within the addict to place him on the road to recovery is not necessarily "rock bottom," or conformity to a program's dictates or a state of new knowledge. Rather, it is a shift in will. By whatever process (and Talmadge is quite aware that there seem to be many paths) the addict has come to care about sobriety in a way he or she did not before. He or she now cares in a way that is part of him or her... (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

_From the president of Wesleyan University, an illuminating history of the student, spanning from antiquity to Zoom “[Roth] has a clear vision for what it ought to mean to be a student: Learn what you love to do, get better at it, and then share it with others.”—David Perry, _Washington Post__ In this sweeping book, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, (...) from the sixth century BCE to the present. Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have been followers, interlocutors, disciples, rebels, and children becoming adults. There are many ways to be a student, Roth argues, but at their core is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others, and thereby finding freedom. In an age of machine learning, this book celebrates the student who develops more than mastery, cultivating curiosity, judgment, creativity, and an ability to keep learning beyond formal schooling. Roth shows how the student throughout history has been someone who interacts dynamically with the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Calling Obesity a Disease Is A Terrible DecisionMoose FinklesteinFactsThe medical world struggles to see the difference between health and body weight. It is still mostly combined with the strong belief that there is no way a fat person can be fit and healthy. Despite repeated studies and work to show differently, this prejudice remains. This has become part of what I call “Everyone Knows” pseudoscience, where data that have (...) no scientific basis become “fact” due to constant repetition.Obesity is already the cause of great stigma in our society. Fat people are considered “ugly,” fat jokes are acceptable in everyday life, and being called ‘fat’ is, to many, as big an insult as a racial slur. Fat prejudice can approach the levels of racial prejudice (Puhl, Andreyevea & Brownell, 2008). Fat children are bullied, sometimes to the point of suicide. Some studies have found children as young as five trying to diet for being fat, no matter their actual weight. Fat people are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, and there are prejudicial beliefs that fat workers are more problematic, despite research saying otherwise (Roehling, Roehling, & Odland, 2008).Obesity is seen by the masses as something people choose. However, science disagrees. There has long been a link between depression and obesity. Mental health is tightly tied to obesity, where those who experience weight discrimination are more likely to gain weight, although unhealthy behaviours such as binge eating and exercise avoidance are sometimes seen as a coping mechanism (Sutin & Teracciano, 2013).It has been reported in a number of journals that 90–95% of the people who lose weight regain the weight within 10 years (Mann et al., 2007; Miller, 1999). “Everyone Knows” claims that this is because people go back to bad habits. Science, however, says that there are complex ways the body wants to regain the weight (Sumithran & Proietto, 2013; Sumithran et al., 2011). Worse, dieting may contribute to obesity. Adolescent girls who diet are at 324% greater risk for obesity than those who do not diet (Stice, Cameron, R. P., Killen, J. D., Hayward, C. & Taylor, C. B. 1999). Weight loss dieting may cause other health problems as well, such as immune system problems (Shade ED, et al. 2004).In the medical world, doctors are encouraged to talk to patients about their weight. Every fat person has heard, “What are we going to do about your weight?” The “we” is supposed encourage the patient to feel that the doctor is on the patient’s side in their battle. Yet what many patients hear is, “I don’t see you as a patient, I see you as fat.” Science says that the higher a patient’s BMI the less respect a doctor has for the patient (Huzinga, Cooper, Bleich, Clark, & Beach, 2009).Horror stories about fat people trying to get decent health care are everywhere. For a good example, see Bruce Taylor Seeman’s piece, “The Perils of Obesity May Include the Doctor” (2006). [End Page E1] There are many blogs and stories on the internet about the way patients are not just shamed for their weight, but actively bullied by medical professionals. One blog, The Well Rounded Mama (wellroundedmama.blogspot.com), discusses the bias of doctors against pregnant fat women, who are told things like, “You cannot have a healthy baby when you are this fat” and encouraged to abort. Tales from people told that their weight is the cause for everything and anything can be found on sites like First Do No Harm (fathealth.wordpress.com). Reading blogs by medical professionals can show the disdain they have for fat people. In one, an emergency room nurse declared that all fat diabetics have poor control, based solely on perceptions from her job. Comments were mostly other nurses agreeing with how “disgusting” fat people are to have to deal with. However, Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity not only recognizes the problem but aims to help medical professionals eliminate the bias.If obesity becomes a disease, weight loss surgery (WLS) becomes a bigger gold mine. Medical insurance will be more likely to cover weight loss surgery. WLS is an ever-changing target: there... (shrink)

I am lying on a small table in a tiny room, dizzy with nausea and apprehension. A young woman busies herself with the preparations of a plaster mold that will be used to position my arm and chest for the twenty five ‘shots’ of radiotherapy that I will undergo during the ensuing five weeks. I had called the hospital that morning to say that I was too sick to come for this appointment. I had better come, said a young man (...) from the department, because if I missed this appointment I would I might not get a new appointment in time start the treatments within the recommended time frame. So I am here, on the table. I mention the nausea to the technician. My apprehension at this moment is that I might become so dizzy as to somehow swirl out of control. The young woman gives me a mask to blunt the smell of the plaster. The procedure will take twenty-five minutes. I keep my mind focused on each breath and get through the ordeal breath by breath. She seems, in contrast to me, gloriously free of distress and worry, listening to the radio while she works. I envy her good fortune. As we finish up the procedure I take a chance and share my experience: I say that being a cancer patient can be tricky because you are sometimes utterly in the grip of the idea that the cancer will spread and you’ll die soon and in a very unpleasant way. After each round of chemo I was admitted to hospital for extreme nausea and dehydration. During those days in the cancer ward some of those who were dying called out and moaned distressingly, sometimes for hours, during the night. I was, at those moments, unable to shake off the belief that I too would be in that state within a few months. The signs of cancer had been missed on the mammogram two years earlier and, when the lump made itself evident, I was in Stage III. When I mentioned this experience of being gripped by the idea of death she said “Oh I know exactly what you mean, my mother has breast cancer, and every time she has an examination I go searching the internet to find out what I can.” This young woman was twenty four, and I fifty six at the time, and she had given me an unexpected small precious gift that I took with me out of that little cupboard of a room.. (shrink)