Existential Freedom Research Articles

JUDGMENT FREEDOM MODEL IN JUDGING CORRUPTION CRIMINAL CASES

The independence of judges is based on independence, therefore it is guaranteed in law. Judges adjudicating corruption cases must be professional, clean, honest, courageous and free from intra-judicial and extra-judicial influences. The problem in this research is how the model of freedom of judges in judging cases of corrup-tion in the Corruption Court, especially in the Corruption Court at the Kls I A District Court in Bandung. This research was carried out with a normative and empirical juridical approach, namely studying legal materials systematically to discuss problems obtained from literature studies, by analyzing a legal problem through the concept of legal philosophy associated with the freedom of Judgment in adjudicating corruption cases and The data obtained were ob-tained from field research and interviews. The purpose of this research is to examine the model of Judgment freedom in examining, adjudicating and deciding cases of Corruption Crime, while the benefits of this research are expected to produce scientific work that is beneficial for the development of legal science as well as material for scientific work that will be published in the National Journal., as well as teaching material for students of the Faculty of Law in particular who take courses in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law and Legal Philosophy. From this research, it is found that judges in deciding cases of corruption can apply existential freedom and social freedom to produce a just decision based on the one and only Godhead.

The End Once Again: Art and Politics at the Close of the Century

Taking the measure of the zeitgeist is never an easy task, with every thing to recommend avoiding it. Yet here we are, near the end of a century, indeed a millennium, and the temptation seems more and more irresistible. Early indications suggest that this time no one is going to be caught up in glib repetition, that we have come to regard all that fin de siecle stuff as very suspicious. After all, anti-foundationalism flourishes and this time it appears as if we will take our existential freedom seriously, but minus the melodrama, and that we will also apply the lessons of poststructuralism -- the constructedness of all concepts, the decentered self, the privileging of undecidability -- but consistently, without exception. History, we believe, will sort itself out, or, more accurately, allow us to sort it out without benefit of metanarratives, repeated patterns or transcendent instances; for history, as one sage put it, is ultimately just one damn thing after another. If anything can escape rhetoric or emplotment, we tend to feel, it is sheer numeracy, and so one hundred years, or a thousand, is simply a unit of measurement, nothing to be grand or melancholic about. Yet can we really look at the numerals 2001 and see no figure at all? What lover of rhetoric can sneeze at a millennium? A more honest posing of the problem would admit that we will almost certainly see some figural shape, at the same time that we can decide, more or less freely, whether it will be an angel, a rough beast, or simply a human form that greets us, looking back or ahead, or even staring blankly. With respect to the question of whether it will it be human, all too human, or somehow less or more than that, at present the notion of the post-human appears entrenched, and the closing pages of Les Mots et les Choses, where Foucault's dream of the end of humanity is teasingly glimpsed, are frequently cited. What we need to bear in mind, however, is the extent to which this version of the fin de siecle might turn out to be an unhappy (or vanished?) reflection of ourselves, a version built on affectless irony and promises unfulfilled. In short, as we approach the year 2000 we are tempted by configurations of exhausted millenniums made new, because of the reassurance they give us, even while increasingly we suspect that such visionings are too secure in their closures and false significances. This double temptation--to chose to focus on the new, or to suspect all such configurations--shapes our political and artistic imaginations and traditions, and recently several contributions to the ages-long debate about art and politics have exhibited this temptation toward either the millennial (the figure of time redeemed) or the immediate (time left to its shapeless forms). My purpose here is to review this debate in order to shed some light on our political and artistic possibilities, and perhaps even to suggest -- without practical proposals -- a way beyond the impasse. I begin with a discussion of the political dimension, then move to a consideration of literary criticism that attempts to be political, and end with an argument about the nature of the literary imagination in relation to the rest of our experience. My claim is that we are seldom able to resist completely the temptation to schematize our history, despite knowing that this distorts our political hopes and esthetic dreams; my (tentative) suggestion is that a reconsideration of John Dewey's thought on these issues may improve our prospects. The post-communism currently being speculated on in various quarters can serve as the harbinger of how the end of an old order inevitably suggests the start of a new, and how the old-turned-new is a powerfully shaping trope. Few people see the events in Eastern Europe as having cleared away the falsehoods of actually existing so that we can now start to work on a true socialism. Other participants in the dialogue maintain, however, that socialism itself has not been discredited. …

ХОЛИСТИЧЕСКАЯ МОДЕЛЬ КОГНИТИВНОНОЭТИЧЕСКОГО РАЗВИТИЯ ЛИЧНОСТИ

With the holistic dynamic approach to the issues of noetic-cognitive development, the conceptual historical cycle initiated by Anaxagoras becomes particularly important. The milestones from his insight are: Nous (Anaxagoras) → Eidos (Plato) → Archetype (C.G. Jung) → Metanoia (J. White). This approach with this concept leads us to a revision of the consciousness ideals as the ultimate holistic and noetic reality. With shifts in peak experiences (based on their ultimate universes of time, space, information and energy) of noetic states of consciousness being measured today. We now can have a better non-reductive look at the transboundary qualities of the holistic realities such as trans-temporality, translocality, transinformativeness, and transergicity. The most authentic levels of holarchy are related to these ultimate universes: emergence with trans-temporality; attractiveness with translocality; fractality with trans-informativeness; and quantumness with transergicity. These levels of holarchy are manifested in the context of a person’s cognitive-noetic development as psychosemantic units of varying complexity such as values, concepts, constructs and symbols. The practical implementation of multilevel holonoetic development is possible in the context of a relevant educational system, which generates new meaning for a person and, as a result, readies them for self-realization. Harmony and synchronicity of holonoetic processes arises and is realized in creative communications, i.e. in transcommunications, which is fundamentally different from mechanical control, which inevitably forces the deprivation of degrees of freedom from the controlled object. Therefore, existential freedom in cognitive-noetic transcommunication is an important condition for creative sense formation. The objective is that the optimal “figure” of a multilevel holarchy of educational environment and a separate module of an individual educational environment will be the shape of a cone or triangle with its apex downward (a metaphor opposite to traditional education). The emergent value-semantic cycle hence would set the largest transdisciplinary scale. Further, the educational cycle would be concretized and deepened through conceptualization, constructiveness and sharp design solutions. The model of psychosemantics of a person’s noetic-cognitive development becomes effective in understanding the mutual conjugation of dynamic and structural psychosemantic modalities. They form an integral structural-dynamic matrix model. Its columns are motivation, sensitive-perception, imagination and emotional vectors. The rows of the matrix are formed by multilevel psychosemantic units: symbolic, constructive, conceptual and valuesemantic. Thus, all psychosemantic modalities form differentiated and structured semantic fields. They can be translated into systems of categories and analytical counting units of content analysis. This allows building analytical and prognostic profiles of both the content spheres of the educational environment and their subjects.

Eclesiological Communitarism of Miroslav Volf

Abstract: The article analyzes the features of the doctrine of the church of the outstandingProtestant theologian of the early XXI century Miroslav Volf. Volf's understanding of the church as a reality that preceded the emergence of the individual as a Christian means a radical break with liberal Protestant ideas of the church community as created by the voluntary decision of individuals. But Volf does not share the collectivist idea of ​​the church as an organism in which the individual is completely subjugated to the whole. It is established that Volf creates a communitarian model of the church, in which the church community is understood as the unity of diversity. Unity itself has the character of interpersonal relations. Individuals with different charisms in the community interact with each other like the fellowship of the Three in God. Communitarianism in Volf's ecclesiology as a "middle way" between liberal individualism and total collectivism has all the hallmarks of postliberal theological theory. It is proved that Volf's communitarianism became a creative development of Christian personalism of the XX century with its emphasis on the existential freedom of the individual and the importance of interpersonal relations.
 Volf succeeded in building ecclesiological communitarianism not so much because of his many specific speculations about the organization of church communities, but because of his vision of personalism. Namely, as we noted above, Volf combines the idea of ​​personality as dependent on its relations with other personalities (here he develops Ratzinger's theory) with the vision of personality as an apophatic secret that is higher than all its properties and charisma (here he creatively interprets the theory Zizioulas). Accordingly, a personality that exists in absolute openness to the influences of other personalities on the one hand, and is absolutely unique on the other, makes possible the existence of a communitarian church community. Volf emphasizes that the catholicity (completeness and completeness) of the individual Christian personality is as necessary as the catholicity of the whole church community. The characterization of the individual as a conciliar presupposes not only the traditional ideal of the integrity of all faculties and the charisma of the individual in his intention to communicate with God, but also the vision of the legitimacy of the inner diversity of the individual. The possible complexity of the identity of the individual is almost infinite, and the willingness to accept it in the community - the main feature of Volf's communitarianism. Similarly, every ecclesial community must be ready to accept as Christian all other ecclesial communities, whatever the peculiarities of their identity. It is clear that such an understanding of catholicity is possible only in Protestantism. As Volf rightly points out, Catholicism presupposes that the ecclesial community must be the local embodiment of the common ecclesial identity of the whole structure, and Orthodoxy emphasizes that a separate community is necessarily identical in identity to the common identity of the church through the Eucharist. Volf's communitarianism allows us to describe church communities and their associations as network structures in which all individuals are active actors whose abilities and charisms are important for the constitution of communities.

Meeting death and embracing existential loneliness: A cancer patient’s experience of being the sole author of his life

Facing the truth of death in silence instead of fearing and denying it enables people to regain their freedom. This qualitative case study aimed to illuminate the meaning of a single person’s experience of confronting death and living with cancer. The transcripts of unstructured interviews were analyzed using the hermeneutic phenomenological method. Data analysis led to extraction of four themes including “Confronting death, meeting nonbeing and longing for being”, “Embracing existential loneliness, responsibility and freedom”, “Taking over the mind, living mindfully, a meaningful life”, and “Flourishing authentic self-love, moving in the path of caring and healing the self”.

Philosophical and Anthropological Explication of the Concept of “Personality” Through the Prism of Human Existential Freedom

The article presents the philosophical and anthropological explication of personality in the context of human existential freedom. Existential freedom as a basis for understanding an integral personality and the sociocultural determinants of the constituting of human freedom are analyzed. It is shown that personal freedom can be realized either in the direction of greater satisfaction of one’s natural inclinations or towards overcoming these same inclinations and desires, but can be based on the search for a balance between the first and second determinants of human existence.

A Clinical Strategy to Strengthen the Connection Between Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior: From Philosophical Principles to Psychotherapy Practice

Helping clients gain insight into the ways in which their thinking influences the expression of emotional distress and maladaptive behavior is an important goal of CBT-based psychotherapies. However, efforts to establish this insight into the connection between dysfunctional beliefs and the consequences of having them (i.e., B–C connection) are often met with resistance. To address this issue in practice, therapists can draw upon certain existential principles underpinning CBT theory. More specifically, practitioners can use the concepts of existential freedom and responsibility, contained in the rational-humanistic view of rational-emotive behavior therapy, to complement current disputation strategies in the object to establish the B–C connection and, importantly, to facilitate cognitive change. Employing in practice what is postulated in theory in such cases is apt to provide individuals with a larger context of human agency in which to consider cognitive mediation.

Uncanny arts and the aesthetics of cyberneticexistentialism

Abstract ‘Uncanny’ works by a number of contemporary artists are analysed in relation to the themes and insights of both cybernetics and existentialist philosophy. This reveals that central ideas from these largely neglected fields remain current and potent within innovative art practices. Artists employ cybernetic systems to provoke aesthetic sensations of the uncanny, while simultaneously encapsulating existentialist concerns. Pierre Huyghe’s mysterious installation responds to the life-breath of visitors to mutate human cancer cells. Susan Collins and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer construct cybernetic worlds-within-worlds to render us beings-for-others during intimate encounters with strangers. Urich Lau and TC&A involve and implicate the audience in eerie expressions of what existentialist term being-towards-death. These artworks prompt feelings of separation, alienation and existential angst; and emphasize human estrangement within a mysterious, incomprehensible or absurd world. But a cybernetic-existentialist reading also reveals that their evocation of human disquiet and isolation is tempered by an equal emphasis on positive notions of feedback loops, ‘separation with communion’, existential freedom and authentic interactions with the world and with Others. The artworks articulate cybernetics’ and existentialism’s shared interest in collapsing boundaries and erasing distinctions: between agents within a system; between the self and the Other; and between perceiving, feeling and acting.

Editorial

One could be forgiven for asserting that Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism has become fashionable again, a worldview fitting for our time. How else can we interpret last year’s publication of Surfing with Sartre by Adam James, with existential freedom compared to the controlled manipulation of the surfing board?

De Beauvoir, Existentialism and Marx

In this article, I focus on de Beauvoir’s view and argue that, alongside an original account of existential freedom, she utilises a Marxist-inspired historical materialism as a methodological tool with which to analyse the social position of women. First, I discuss existential freedom and highlight de Beauvoir’s introduction of gender, whereby the concepts of material, social and situational conditions cohere to restrict the possibility of freedom and agency for women. Next, I explore Marx’s view on freedom and de Beauvoir’s endorsement that in order to promote human flourishing, structural and material change is required. Although some tensions prevail, I conclude that by weaving together existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism in her unique way, Simone de Beauvoir offers a complex and nuanced approach to human freedom.

The Freedom of Facticity

“Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. I am all of this for the Other with no hope of changing it.” Thus wrote Sartre in his Being and Nothingness. But was not Sartre the major advocate of existential freedom, with the tenet that “we are condemned to be free”—no matter what our situation might be? The question hence arises: How free are we from the facticity of situations, particularly ones in which we are subject to collective identification? How free are we to change the situations—places, environments, histories, others—that we inevitably belong to and which subject us to collective identities? How free are we from identification in terms of others? How free are we to transform such identification? These questions are of particular relevance given the harmful effects of collective ascriptions and the currently pressing demand to transform them. In an attempt to address these questions, I offer as alternative to Sartre’s concept of the “facticity of freedom” what I would like to call the “freedom of facticity”.

The Analytic System of Martin Heidegger’s Da-sein and the Anthropology of Max Scheler in the Educational Perspective

When applied to education, Heidegger’s analysis of Da-sein suggests that in his ontology the epistemological problem of clarifying cognition is replaced by the existential problem of the cognition of the understanding individual. Thus, Heidegger treats “education” ontologically as the ability to achieve Da-sein as one’s own true and integral being whose Da-sein always takes precedence in understanding. On this basis, we can say that Heidegger treats education as a transcendental ontological structure that he, like Scheler, calls “disclosedness.” And although Heidegger almost never uses the term “education” in his analytic system, preferring instead to use expressions such as “authentic being,” “projection of the self,” etc., all of this content that he invests in this term closely follows Scheler’s interpretation, because it also characterizes human existence as “open” and “not foreordained.” For Scheler, the same “open” existence is an expression of existential human freedom, since it serves to manifest the spirit as the ontological principle. Considered in epistemological and value terms, this freedom, according to Scheler, is what he refers to as “education,” a transcending state of being that is manifested for another thing in existence as something that is “known” by loving participation in it with a view to achieving “one’s authentic self.”

Ευθανασία: Ηθικά διλήμματα πολιτισμικής αυτοσυνειδησίας

This paper focuses on the anthropological background of Euthanasia’s cultural profile, claiming that a cultural reception of Euthanasia should previously deal with anthropological questions such as patient’s autonomy and its relation to existential freedom, the fear of death, the meaning of personal experience of pain in shaping one’s own freedom and the cardinal importance of community’s role in patient’s palliative care. The theological thinking can contribute in this interscientific dialogue on the end of life, re-opening the question of the ontology of person and consequently the question of eschatology.

Phenomenology and Teleology: Hans Jonas's Philosophy of Life

Although Hans Jonas's theory of responsibility has been influential on continental European environmental ethics, his philosophy of life, which seeks to rehabilitate a teleological account of living beings and describe their differing degrees of ‘existential freedom’, is less well-known. In this article, I reconstruct the stages of Jonas's phenomenological account and address the key criticisms levelled at it. I argue that although Jonas's theory is flawed by internal contradictions, these may be rectifiable, and, if so, his philosophy of life could also provide an ontological rationale for a biocentric ethic. I conclude that for these reasons his work deserves greater scholarly attention.

Existential Freedom in The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The purpose of this study is to trace the philosophical implication of John Fowles’s literary texts to explore the organic link between existential freedom and his writing of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles is dealing here with three kinds of freedom: social, individual and narrative. The author first interprets Fowle’s concern of freedom from social support. Then the author is devoted to the study of individual freedom. Finally, the author goes on to argue that narrative freedom is a metaphor for freedom from God, a precondition for existential freedom. Fowles’s FLW bears his philosophical assertion that freedom of will is the highest human good.

In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ōe Kenzaburō

This essay considers the nonfictional writings on black literature and American race relations penned by Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō between the years 1961 (when Ōe attended the Asian-African Writers Conference held in Tokyo) and 1968 (when he delivered a series of speeches in Kinokuniya Hall on American race relations). In these nonfictional musings, Ōe posits an analogous existential dilemma shared by the postwar Japanese and post–civil rights era African-Americans. Ōe's proposed solution to this dilemma—a kind of existential freedom rooted in celebrating ethnic and racial diversity—is highly informed by his reading of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.

Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" eds. by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible

Reviewed by: Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" eds. by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible Victor Luftig RETHINKING JOYCE'S "DUBLINERS", edited by Claire A. Culleton and Ellen Scheible. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 226 pp. $99.99. This collection demonstrates, at times wonderfully, that there is still much to be said about Dubliners—though I am not convinced that it represents a "rethinking" any more than would any other critical volume. Nor am I convinced that the collection meaningfully escapes the trap its editors bemoan or that Dubliners criticism needs the liberation for which they call. But it does hint at what more radical rethinking might look like. The premise for Rethinking Joyce's "Dubliners" is that an excessive focus on the trope of paralysis has effectively paralyzed criticism about the stories. That claim, however, seems sometimes to depend on a self-congratulatory stacking of the deck; and the proposed alternatives to paralysis do not always seem so different from the ostensibly rejected trope. That is most apparent in the first essay, by Claire A. Culleton, which argues that "insisting only on treating the paralysis in the stories discourages readers from seeing the incredible movement that was alive and moving about Dublin as Joyce wrote these stories" (11). That "only" seems to me suspect. As I have looked back at the readings that are supposed to illustrate an exclusive focus on paralysis, I find plenty else—for instance, references to Joyce's wish, amidst the same famous exchange in which he refers to "paralysis," to foster the "spiritual liberation" of Ireland (SL 88). Jack Dudley, one of the contributors who most closely follows Culleton's lead in challenging "'the simple paralysis reading'" (a phrase Dudley takes from Dominic Head1), builds his essay on the sound point that we have not taken "the idea of particularly 'spiritual liberation'" seriously enough. It is good that he does so, in relation to "Grace" here, but to say that the idea is "seldom considered" (173), as he also does, is something else again and is belied by my own review of some critical texts that invoke paralysis as a central theme of Dubliners. Does one really generate fresh insights by taking stories long associated with paralysis and associating them instead with fruitless, [End Page 437] foredoomed movement, as the editors recommend? To insist on the importance of the distinction requires Culleton to treat as absolute and literal—"It is different from not moving: one cannot move. In Dubliners, there is no loss of muscle function" (19)—what the "entrenched" criticism has treated mainly, outside of "The Sisters," as metaphor. Culleton's co-editor, Ellen Scheible, begins her excellent piece by making a more subtle distinction, characterizing paralysis in Dubliners as a condition in which "the struggle to identify … progressive movement … occurs inside the mental space of its characters and is impeded, consistently, by the trappings of the body" (94). Scheible needs no critical strawmen to set up her deft deployment of "The Dead" to get at the way that "postcolonial subjectivity must undergo a mirror stage where it recognizes the impossibility of unified nationhood implicit in its development and recognition of a nation" (108). The essays that follow Culleton's lead in positioning themselves mainly as rejecting or rethinking previous critics' ostensibly narrow commitment to the idea of paralysis seem to me a little hamstrung by that insistence. But other essays, beginning with Scheible's, turn fruitfully towards a different set of struggles. Indeed, the collection stages what I think is a really interesting critical debate about the status in Dubliners of colonial Ireland's women and the poor. It begins with Jim LeBlanc's extending Culleton's comment on "Eveline" to claim that the story depicts "the self-imposed rejection of the possibility of escape from Dublin" (55). Indeed, LeBlanc claims that, in Dubliners,"limits to personal freedom are usually self-imposed or intentionally unchallenged" (56); LeBlanc's assignment of an unappreciated Sartrean "existential freedom" to Joyce's characters results in a rather shockingly (at least I was shocked) neoliberal reading according to which Dubliners are actually free, and just unwilling, to overcome poverty, addiction, misogyny, and colonial oppression. But the collection effectively counters...

Existential Kepesh and the Facticity of Existential Roth: The Breast, The Professor of Desire, and The Dying Animal

The article argues that Philip Roth's Kepesh saga — The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1997), and The Dying Animal (2001) — dramatically morphs, with regard to sexuality and imaginative flight, Sartre's account, in Being and Nothingness ( L'etre et le neant , 1943), of the origins and possibilities of consciousness and their relation to desire. Indeed, desire, the dominant theme of Roth's trilogy, corresponds to Sartrian outlooks on transcendent possibility or existential freedom. In Being and Nothingness , moreover, Roth appears to have located, identified with, and artistically transformed outlooks on consciousness and artistic creativity. Roth's inspiration for imagining a character who exists as a breast, sans body, may also have emerged from Sartre's treatise, the outlooks of which allow for better appreciation of the concerns and fictive possibilities suggested by The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal .

THE IMPACTS OF THE BEAUTY MYTH ON THE EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM OF PECOLA IN TONI MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the destructive impacts of the beauty myth on the existential freedom of Pecola, the young, poor, black female character, in Toni Morrison‘s ―The Bluest Eye.‖ The analysis is done through feminist criticism supported by the concept of the beauty myth and beauty as well as Sartrean concept of existentialism. The result shows that the widely spread beauty myth blocks Pecola‘s existential freedom on the physical, consciousness, or social life level. All these lead to young Pecola‘s ruined existence.

Information Society and Space of Freedom

The article posed and solved the problem: interaction of existential and social freedom in the “network” (information) society, the role of information factor in formation of objective and subjective elements of freedom, real and virtual freedom in the Internet space.