Existential Choice Research Articles

Spiritual Dryness and Celibacy in Catholic Priests – Discernment of Ongoing Spiritual Journeys from Relational and Psychosexual Immaturities

The celibacy of Roman Catholic priests, in contrast to a single lifestyle, implies an existential choice for spiritual reasons as a conscious motivation. Nevertheless, several of them struggle with celibacy life style and some experience phases of spiritual dryness. So far it is unclear which role priestly celibacy may play in this context. We therefore intended to investigate whether and how celibacy on the one hand and supportive relations to other persons and feelings of loneliness on the other hand are connected to the experience of spiritual dryness among priests. As part of the German Pastoral Ministry Study, we analyzed data sets of 2531 priests. The results at first hand confirmed a correlation of spiritual dryness with a low commitment to celibacy and loneliness. Regression analyses revealed problems with sexuality and loneliness as an inability to be alone are relevant indicators of spiritual dryness. Our results point to two important concomitant mental conditions in a considerable number of cases: to continuous psychosexual problems and immaturities on one hand and to a basic incapacity to be alone, pointing to a serious structural deficit in the psychic life of some of our participants. Our study finally is a call to address these problems adequately, first of all for the mental health and spiritual truth of these persons, secondly also in the interest of all of those who priests are called to minister.

PHILOSOPHY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF STUDENTS’ REFLECTIVE ACTIVITIES

The article discusses the concept of teaching university philosophy course. The current teaching of philosophy at the university does not correspond the requirements of the time, as it is focused on gaining knowledge of philosophy. Such an orientation is characteristic of a classical university, which can exist only in a situation of stability and relatively slow changes in the social world around it. Modern University prepares its graduates for professional activities in a continuously and rapidly changing world. The present dynamic life requires from a specialist the skills of independent, critical work with information, responsible use of it. The purpose of the article is to determine the conceptual foundations of a university philosophy course that correspond contemporary realities. The necessity of orientation of philosophy to the formation and development of the student's skill of reflection problems and issues of professional activity and daily life is justified. In this regard, the task of the university philosophy course seems to be equipping the graduate with the philosophical tools of reflexive activity. Solving this task is promoted by such methods of mastering philosophy as self-reflection, reading and analysis of philosophical texts and discourses. Experience shows that these methods work most effectively in thinking about questions of moral and existential choice, individual freedom, professional mission, the search for the meaning of life, etc., that is, in the analysis of real life situations.
 In conclusion, it is concluded that the conceptual basis of teaching philosophy in higher education today must be transformed from the study of philosophy to the practice of philosophy.

Faith and Forgetfulness: Homo Religiosus, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Heidegger

Religion often is conceived as the sine qua non of the human, thus imbedding religious activity implicitly even within our cosmopolitical globalization processes and secular political concepts. This depiction of the human as ever-religious raises a host of concerns: Does it justify that we can believe ourselves to hold a religious identity without any existential choice or faith? Would it entail the presumption of God’s existence, thus possibly leading to God’s becoming a banal Faktum that inhibits the subject from being able to disavow God or not believe? And finally, how is it possible to relate authentically/existentially with our religious life without disregarding this quality of religion as always already operative? In order to provide more specificity to this latter question in particular, this paper focuses on an essential aspect of homo religiosus: faith. Focusing principally upon Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien, this paper develops three ways “forgetfulness” is indispensable to faith; or in another sense, how faith itself also operates in, and is acheived through implicit ways. Indeed, if forgetting is essential to faith, and faith is essential to homo religiosus, then “forgetting” also to some degree is essential to religious life.

Ремінісценції лінгвіста до теорії ідентифікації: епістолярій Пантелеймона Куліша. Стаття 1

In E. Erickson’s theory of identification the article analyses the epistolary of Panteleimon Kulish – an outstanding Ukrainian culturologist, publisher, writer and translator. The author states that E. Erickson’s theory created the intellectual matrix of a person’s development analysis in the system of psychosocial conditions and circumstances. The scholar studies E. Erickson’s main postulate, namely the correlation of a personality with psychosocial identity. Therefore, a personality can be interpreted in the integrity of various motivations, traditions, values, ideals and their social roles. The author explores the influence of cultural and historical factors on a person’s psycho-emotional and creative structure. The theory of evolution is considered, which, according to E. Erickson, defines eight universal stages of human development. The scholar investigates the principles of development stages, i.e. a) progressive development of a person, which is ready to evolve in the direction of further growth, expansion of the perceived outlook and possibilities of social interaction; b) the development of a person’s social and creative capabilities in coordination with changes in society, when society promotes preservation of interaction trends. The major problem in the analysis of P. Kulish’s creative person is the problem of ethnic identification. The article explores the criteria of P. Kulish’s ethnic identification: existential choice, ways of self-realization, achievement of internal freedom, solving individual-psychological problems of belonging to a certain social strata, realization of a person’s powerful intentions in the national language.

When the Music Stops

The modern global humanitarian system takes the form it does because it is underpinned by liberal world order. Now the viability of global liberal institutions is increasingly in doubt, a backlash against humanitarianism (and human rights) has gained momentum. I will argue that without liberal world order, global humanitarianism as we currently understand it is impossible, confronting humanitarians with an existential choice: how might they function in a world which doesn’t have liberal institutions at its core? The version of global humanitarianism with which we are familiar might not survive this transition, but maybe other forms of humanitarian action will emerge. What comes next might not meet the hopes of today’s humanitarians, however. The humanitarian alliance with liberalism is no accident, and if the world is less liberal, its version of humanitarian action is likely to be less liberal too. Nevertheless, humanitarianism will fare better than its humanist twin, human rights, in this new world.

РЕМІНІСЦЕНЦІЇ ЛІНГВІСТА ДО ТЕОРІЇ ІДЕНТИФІКАЦІЇ: EПІСТОЛЯРІЙ ПАНТЕЛЕЙМОНА КУЛІША. СТАТТЯ 2

The article is devoted to the analysis of the complex process of evolution of Panteleimon Kulish's worldview. Panteleimon Kulish was a polyphonic personality who left in the history of the Ukrainian culture the heritage of a writer, publisher and translator. P. Kulish's epistolary and creative work are investigated in the categories of E. Erickson's theory, which has become an intellectual matrix for understanding the processes of a subject's development in certain psychosocial conditions and circumstances. In E. Erickson's theory of identification the article analyses the epistolary of Panteleimon Kulish – an outstanding Ukrainian culturologist, publisher, writer and translator. The author states that E. Erickson's theory created the intellectual matrix of a person's development analysis in the system of psychosocial conditions and circumstances. The scholar studies E. Erickson's main postulate, namely the correlation of a personality with psychosocial identity. The stages of evolution of P. Kulish's national self-consciousness (from assertion of slavophilе positions in his youth to evolutionary extension of the author's worldview) are considered. Accordingly, the dominant of the artist's Ukrainian-centricity, enrichment of his worldview with European ideas, ideals, cultural facts and, as a consequence, a formed outlook with understanding of the identification perspective of the nation in European history and culture are analyzed. The major problem in the analysis of P. Kulish's creative person is the problem of ethnic identification. The article explores the criteria of P. Kulish's ethnic identification: existential choice, ways of self-realization, achievement of internal freedom, solving individual-psychological problems of belonging to a certain social strata, realization of a person's powerful intentions in the national language. The analytics of the article is based on P. Kulish's epistolary that is a representative form of the author's communication with the leading writers and public figures of the Slavic world in the middle of the 19th century. The epistolary enables to build a panorama of ideas and concepts that have been developed by intellectuals in the context of analyzing the problem of national identity.

Stratagem Rationality of Traditional China

For a long time, leading European thinkers have denied systematic, theoretical and rational nature of Chinese traditional thinking, unpretentiously reading it as banal moralizing (“moral philosophy,” at best – “moral metaphysics,” etc.), not supported by any proper philosophical discourse. However, the habitual socioethical label conceals a much deeper problematic of strategic thinking. At its center, there is the question of choosing all sorts of strategies: from everyday life to special technical ones, from personal existential choice to fateful state decisions. The concept of a winning strategy is emblematized by the dramatic plot of a deadly risk (“stepping on a tiger’s tail”) but under certain conditions with guaranteed happy end. The strategy of harmony (he 和), which is miraculous in its effectiveness, is proposed as a exemplary strategy. It allows you to “step on the tiger’s tail” with impunity (lü hu wei履 虎尾). From the point of view of strategic thinking, the criterion of cognitive value of reasoning is its effectiveness (in the context of a particular game), and the most effective is unmistakable prediction, i.e. the ability to predict the outcome of future developments with the help of reasoning. In the ideal case (under certain conditions), prognostic reasoning becomes not just plausible but 100% reliable that is an apodictic true inference. Therefore, the highest cognitive status in the Chinese intellectual tradition is endowed with guaranteed error-free prognostic reasoning. This type of reasoning, where the reliability of foresight is guaranteed by the implementation of a certain winning strategy, can be called the prognostic form of deduction. As a result, the dynamism of Chinese logic, which relies on a deliberate staging of the future (sometimes with the help of stratagems of varying degrees of cunning), is strikingly different from the static nature of the classical image of logic (both traditional and modern), where logic is no more than a static guardian of correctness of reasoning. On the contrary, the Chinese concept of logic focuses on deriving consequences from strategic considerations regarding the future, actively and purposefully shaped by the subject who at the same time constructing both himself and the world around him.

Карнавальний топос маски у романах Вiтольда Гомбровича Фердидурке та Гео Шкурупiя Дверi в день

The article is devoted to the study of the features of the mask topos in the novels of Witold Gombrowich Ferdydurke and Geo Shkurupia Doors in the day. On the basis of the basic concepts of carnivalization of Mikhail Bakhtin, features of the functioning of the mask image are considered, which is one of the means of expressing new forms of communication with the recipient and the metaphorical language. The mask in the experimental / avant-garde works determines the individual characters of the characters, contributes to the irony of the grotesque. The mask-stereotype in the novel by Witold Gombrowich is the bearer of a certain set of values of the hero, Geo Shkurupii through the mask of the death of the hero demonstrates the existential choice of the hero.

THE DESTINY OF LANGUAGE IN THE CONDITION OF EXILE (approaches to the problem)

The article deals with exile as existential condition in its relationship with the language and the poet as the keeper of language. Based on Joseph Brodsky’s creative heritage, the author shows that exile for the poet is primarily expulsion from the native culture and the native language. The fate of exiled is not given to everybody. The exile is the ultimate lesson of linguistic humility. A person begins to feel himself «a grain of sand in the desert» and finds a special mode of measuring his creative powers - human infinity. Brodsky sees the fertile power of exile in an unprecedented and even lightning acceleration of professional escape into isolation, where a poet is left alone with the language. Moving forward through variety of language spheres and elements, the poet shows how things are there. In order to most closely reflect one or another state of the language, the poet’s soul must fall into that state, be in this state and capture it, perhaps against the personal will, but by the language’s will. The language is despotic; it prescribes what and how to speak. The poet’s craft is to allow the language to speak on its own. There are four modes of exile: initial exile, the birth into the material world as payment for original sin; real belonging to the Jewish, to the nation-exiled (or conscious identification with the Jews); exile from the motherland, or socio-political exile; exile as natural and at the same time - metaphysical condition of the poet. These states strengthen each other. The poet-exiled passes the way from the condition of groundlessness, from the being, lost its meaning, to the beingfulfilled, found its meaning. This way lies through the language, as the necessary purgatory and the only salvation. The ill-fate, a blind trick of fate, through free existential choice, through acceptance of the exile as a punishment and at the same time - as Divine gift transfigures into the destiny, foresight and foreknowledge, both for the poet, and for the language. The destiny of the poet becomes the destiny of the language, and vice versa.

ÁGNES HELLER, LA FILÓSOFA DE LA ELECCIÓN EXISTENCIAL: UNA CONCRETA LIBERTAD UTÓPICA DE UNA PERSONALIDAD AUTÉNTICA

<p>En este artículo me centro en la noción de elección existencial de Ágnes Heller en la interfaz de combinar la determinación histórica y la búsqueda de validez universal. Heller acepta las premisas posmodernas de contingencia. Pero, al mismo tiempo, niega dos tipos de resultados: ya sea aceptar el estado presente de las cosas y convertir la necesidad en una virtud, o seguir lamentando la pérdida del pasado y el actual padecimiento cultural. Entonces, la cuestión central aquí es acercarse a la ética de la personalidad de Heller como si emanara de una combinación profunda de visión moral y valores básicos orientados unidos a una necesidad urgente de responder a las cambiantes exigencias de la vida cotidiana. En el caso de la elección existencial, considero las afirmaciones de Heller que la personalidad es el único valor fundamental. Como un valor único, cada persona debe tomar una decisión acerca de lo que asume bajo su propia responsabilidad.</p>

Existential Choice as Repressed Theism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Giorgio Agamben in Conversation

This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundation of authoritarian governments. As such, the article seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to show that Sartre’s depiction of sovereign decisionism directly parallels how modern democratic governments conduct themselves during a state of emergency. The second is to show that Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity models, what Agamben calls, secularized theism. Through an ontotheological critique of Sartre’s professed atheism, the article concludes that an existential belief in sovereign decision represses, rather than profanes, the divine origins of authoritarian law. I frame the argument with a reading of Sartre’s 1943 play The Flies, which models the repressed theological underpinnings of Sartre’s theory.

Свобода и ответственность личности как показатели ее саморазвития

The work is built around the study of the important direction of the development of modern education, consisting in individualization as the basis for the formation of a self-developing personality. It is postulated that self-development is associated with the existential choice of a person, which occurs at the moment of a life event dictated by a specifi c social situation. The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis of the pedagogical, philosophical and psychological literature on the issue of considering freedom and responsibility, on the one hand, as categories of modern education, on the other hand, as indicators of self-development of the individual. Attention is focused on the educational sense of the category of freedom as freedom not “from” but “for”. Particular attention is paid to the fundamental idea of the concept of existential pedagogy, consisting in the formation of a person who can optimally live his life, making maximum use of his potentials, developing himself and improving himself, realizing himself in socially signifi cant activity. An appeal was made to the ideas of the philosophy of existentialism, which are the basis of the methodology of existential pedagogy, namely: the understanding of essence (J.P. Sartre), choice as the basis of human essence (A. Camus); Freedom as free will (J. Habermas, K. Jaspers), freedom to take responsibility for one’s own destiny, freedom to listen to one’s conscience and make decisions about one’s destiny (V.Frankl); The ideas of existential psychology (V.N. Druzhinin), as well as the psychological theory of overcoming, developed by R.Kh. Shakurov, the main category of which is the barrier that man overcomes and determines his development/self-development.

Transracialism and White Allyship

My reading of Tuvel’s defense of transracialism focuses on her critiques of three main objections to a transracial identity. Tuvel attempts to show how her defense of transracialism stands in the face of these objections. However, I argue that her position is not sufficiently immune to them. In other words, my response delineates the ways in which all three objections remain, and effectively undermine her argument in favor of transracial identities. Additionally, through the question of white allyship, I ask about the moral and political consequences of choosing to identify as transracial. I show that, without a clear account of what an existential choice of racial transitioning implies for allyship across race, Tuvel does not sufficiently establish the differences between the historical constitutions of racialized and sexualized identities. In failing to engage with these moral/political implications, Tuvel’s position does not address the complex relationship between individual agency and collective accountability.

EXISTENTIAL CHOICE. AN ESSAY ABOUT THREE AFRICANS (REFLECTION ON AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS)

Purpose. Via the life example of a great Christian hermit Augustine of Hippo and his «Confessions», the author of the essay considers the existential choice problem, which changes man’s course of life and displays its essence. Analyzing and deconstructing Augustine's self-reflection against the background of the texts by two other great Africans (A. Camou and J. Darrida), the article traces the foundations and main stages of the process of self-seeking in people who want to find themselves in a lost world. The purpose of the article is to analyze the intellectual, emotional and spiritual components of the process of taking epochal-making decisions versus the approaches of A. Camus and J. Derrida, prominent Augustine’s fellow countrymen, born in Algeria as well. Methodology. The research is based on the comparative historical analysis, allowing to identify and summarize some principles for the decision-making of the most important existential solutions. The use of comparative procedures made possible to show the ineffectiveness of self-contained Camus' and Darrida’s existential searches, and at the same time, demonstrate the success of finding selfhood and self-knowledge by Augustine, who was open for the gift descending from Above. The use of other general scientific methods, such as analysis, reduction, generalization, and retrospective method allowed the researcher to highlight some epistemological problems manifested in understanding and searching the Truth, as the most important and often unconscious human need. Augustine's openness to accepting Truth from Above and at the same time understanding the inability to seize it independently distinguishes him from similar searches of Jacques Darrida. Originality. The research has shown that the existential choice, which in contrast to ordinary choices, changes a man’s life and renders meaning to his existence, is made not with a volitional decision, but with a hardly explicable encounter connecting personal with over-personal being. Conclusions. The author concludes, that unlike the day-to-day choices-preferences, which can be made following a rational and ecstatic decision, the existential choice is a dialectic unity of Gift, coming from Above, and an intuitive unconscious faith of a person who accepts this Gift.

The phenomenon of suicide: existential choice of a person or social problem (Philosophical and psychological analysis)

The article is dedicated to the philosophical and psychological analysis of the phenomenon of suicide. The relevance of the topic is associated with the growth of suicidal behavior in modern society, the complexity of the problem and the urgent need to find ways to prevent suicidal behavior. The article attempts to analyze suicide in the unity of three important aspects of the problem: philosophical, psychological and social. The consideration of philosophical theories of different epochs, from antiquity to modern times, regarding the problem of suicide and comparative analysis of statistical data of cases of suicide in different countries, as well as in one country, but in different historical periods were combined. The scientific data of the suicidology, which is presented in the article, reflect the worsening of the problem in the modern world, in particular, in Ukraine. The practical and social value of the work consists in an attempt to unite the social, philosophical and psychological approaches in studying the reasons of suicidal behavior, and, respectively, in their prevention.

Fuzzy alternating automata over distributive lattices

Nondeterminism gives computation models the power of existential choice. As a generalization of nondeterminism, “alternation” gives computation models the power of existential choice and universal choice simultaneously. In this paper, we extend fuzzy nondeterministic automata to a model called fuzzy alternating automata over distributive lattices. Compared with the previous work, a weight labels a leaf node of the run tree rather than be involved in the edge between states when executing a transition. One advantage of our setting is that it is easy to complement a given fuzzy alternating automaton. It suffices to take the dual operation on the transition function and negate final costs on states. Moreover, we show that fuzzy alternating automata have the same expressive power as fuzzy nondeterministic automata, and the former ones are exponentially more succinct than the latter ones. In addition, we illustrate that such exponential blow-up is unavoidable.

Enacting Authenticity: Peter Nichols’s Passion Play and Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in Dialogue

AbstractThis article expands and develops current reformulations of the term ‘authenticity’ by juxtaposing Peter Nichols’s dramatic presentation of (in)authentic behavior in Passion Play, Søren Kierkegaard’s writings on authenticity, and recent studies in psychology and affective neuroscience. Re-thinking Kierkegaard’s views on identity and autonomy in relation to Nichols’s presentation of the experiences of betrayal, despair, and self-governance, the article explores how innovative theatrical performance may cause spectators to physically simulate various modes of existential choice, and elucidates the constitutive role played by bodily responses in the shaping of self-understanding and interpersonal communication. While sharing aspects of Kierkegaard’s category of the ‘individual’, as a person who is fully conscious of him/her self and takes responsibility for that self’s conduct, the model of authentic self-becoming that emerges from this discussion is anchored in a balance between attunement to bodily cues, self-directed reflection, and decisive action.

Fuzzy alternating Büchi automata over distributive lattices

Alternation was first proposed by Chandra et al. for obtaining a theoretical model of parallel computations. Compared with nondeterminism, alternation gives computing devices the power of universal choice in addition to existential choice. In this paper, we put forward a notion of fuzzy alternating Büchi automata over a distributive lattice L (L-ABAs, for short). In our setting, a weight is the label of a leaf node of the run tree when executing a transition, which is helpful in complementing L-ABAs. Taking the dual operation on the transition function and negating final costs on states, we can get the complement of a given L-ABA. We point out that L-ABAs have the same expressive power as L-valued fuzzy nondeterministic Büchi automata (L-NBAs). A construction presented here shows that languages accepted by L-valued fuzzy alternating co-Büchi automata (L-ACAs) are also ω-regular languages. Moreover, closure properties of L-ABAs and decision problems for L-ABAs are also discussed.

THE RUSSIAN LEGAL SPACE AND ITS INFORMATION RESOURCE

The article examines the Russian legal space and its information resource. It is concluded that the modern world is complex in the sense that currently there is a growing concern of a person about the distance, the distance between the spatial position, and by legal developments relating to the situation of existential choice of the person who temporally retreating under the onslaught of the spiritual concerns of the person in front is not certain and the uncertain future. The article substantiates the idea that within the legal time reflects the update and at the same time, the obsolescence of one social form and the emergence of new. The author holds the idea that the interests of preserving the economic and spiritual unity of the market helps to strengthen centripetal trends in the state, and not less than of power the power of administrative and information resource. The article substantiates the idea according to which law, as social regulator, is the first form of the spiritual life of man and society. It is the basis, Foundation of temporal and spatial relations of the person close to freedom.

Staking a Claim to Land, Faith and Family: Burial Location Preferences of Middle Eastern Christian Migrants

ABSTRACTThe question of where to conduct funeral rituals may confront migrants and their descendants with a stark existential choice which reveals much about how identities are negotiated in and through place. This paper scrutinises the relationship between identity and place through the prism of preferred burial location. More concretely, it sets out a typology of motivations for preferred burial location in contexts of migration. In addition to advancing analytical clarity with this typology, the paper also aims to promote theoretical clarity by questioning the hypothesis that burial in the country of residence constitutes a straightforward indicator of migrant integration. Based on 67 qualitative interviews with Christians of Middle Eastern origin in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, the paper presents various rationales for preferred burial location, showing the sometimes ambivalent relationship which migrants negotiate between place and identity.