Human Striving Research Articles

I Made Fire! I—Made—Fire! A Response to “Loneliness” by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

The article is a response to Fromm-Reichmann’s “Loneliness,” first published in the middle of the 20th century and continuing to resonate deeply a quarter through the 21st century. Along with general reflections, Adler’s Individual Psychological theory serves as a framework for the discussion, emphasizing the indivisibility of human nature and oneness as an ultimate human striving and an antidote to loneliness.

Joseph Fletcher on Agapeic Love: An Evaluation

Joseph Fletcher offers a Christian Situation Ethics when he affirms that belief in God and belief in God’s agape’ as the central value of ethics cannot be proven by natural reasoning but can only be held by a free action, chosen by the believer. He interprets 1 John, chapter 4: 16, especially v. 19: “We love because he first loved us,” as establishing that humans only know agapeic love because they have first known and believed in God’s agapeic love as revealed in the greatest love in the actions and teachings of Jesus. However, Bernard Haring a Catholic, 20th century German moral theologian, disagrees with that interpretation, noting that both Augustine and Aquinas hold that although God’s creative love is first in the order of being, it is not first in the order of learning. They hold that humans first experience generous human love amongst humans before they even accept that God’s creative love is first in the order of being. Also, even Karl Barth, the great Swiss Calvinist theologian, has a remarkably positive affirmation of human eros. Barth invents a new term ‘humanity’ in order to recognize the being of humans as “free, radically open, willing, spontaneous, joyful, cheerful and gregarious.” This paper will build upon the positive analysis by Augustine and Aquinas of generous human love as first in the order of learning and upon the positive evaluation of human ‘eros’ and ‘humanity’ as suggested by Barth by developing three main divisions: (1) The paper will draw upon C.S. Lewis’s distinction between need-love and gift-love and evaluate both Fletcher and Lewis himself as offering an inadequate conceptualization of human love as always tainted by need-love. (2) The paper will draw upon the moral philosophies of Aristotle and John Dewey who offer us a most positive evaluation of human love as transcending selfishness in their focus upon a person’s self-actualization in something greater than the self. (3) Finally, the paper will draw upon the reflections of the theologian Gregory Baum who was influenced by the French thinker Maurice Blondel. Blondel and Baum, then, offer a different grasp of humanity and God than the extrinsicist theology offered by Joseph Fletcher and C. S. Lewis in which God swoops in upon human nature to save humans from their sins with the Gift-love from above. Following the lead of Blondel, Baum develops an “intrincisist” grasp of human striving, not as: that of the intellect seeking deeper truth; it is, according to Blondel, the dynamics of the will seeking ever greater self-realization through continued action. It is there, in their willing, that God is present to human beings, and it is in their actions that they say Yes to the divine presence.

The Philosophy of Envy

<i>The Philosophy of Envy</i>

Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetics of St John Henry Newman by Guy NichollsCong. Orat., Gracewing, Leominster, 2019, pp. xxiv + 352, £25.00, hbk

Unearthly Beauty: The Aesthetics of St John Henry Newman by Guy NichollsCong. Orat., Gracewing, Leominster, 2019, pp. xxiv + 352, £25.00, hbk

The Community’s Sage: The Preacher’s Call and the Congregation’s Response

Preaching the gospel within community is always for the sake of the community. It is one means God uses to inject hope into the realm of human striving, cultural rupture, and ecclesiastical instabi...

Alfred Adler Sesquicentennial: The Timeliness Revisited

Alfred Adler Sesquicentennial: The Timeliness Revisited Marina Bluvshtein This is a special issue published in the first quarter of a very special year—marking 150 years since Adler was born in Vienna on February 7, 1870. In 1970, during the centennial celebrations of Alfred Adler, Willard and Marguerite Beecher concluded their “Memorial to Dr. Alfred Adler” with the following: “He needs no adulation since his work speaks for him to each of us differently in a language of its own” (p. 5). A goal of this issue is not to worship but to honor Adler’s life and his legacy—in many languages. As a reader, you will hear many more voices than what you would usually experience when reading other issues of the journal. All together, 28 authors have contributed to this issue. There is a full-length article (“Adlerian Theory and Practice Wisdom Promote Democratic Leadership and Organizational Health,” by John), shorter essays (“The ‘Un-understood’: Adler’s Grasp of Unconscious,” by Prinsloo and Qu), an interview (“Adler’s Theory and Therapy as a River: A Brief Discussion of the Profound Influence of Alfred Adler,” by Watts and Bluvshtein), and a poem (“I Am an Adlerian,” by O’Leary). You will hear about the continuation of Adler’s legacy in Europe (“Looking Back on the Development of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology in Parts of Europe on the 150th Anniversary of His Birth,” by Eife, Ferrero, Neudecker, and Prina) and successful efforts to create evidence-based therapy consistent with Adlerian theory in the United States (“Adlerian Therapy Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” by Len Sperry). You will read inspiring stories about Sophia J. de Vries (“An Inspiring Legacy: Sophia J. de Vries,” by Stein) and Rudolf Dreikurs (“The Contribution of Rudolf Dreikurs to the Theory and Practice of Individual Psychology,” by Abramson). You will read a passionate tribute to Adler’s legacy by the current president of the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology (“Celebrating 150 Years: A President’s Perspective,” by Belangee) and will revisit Adler’s life with his biographer (“Alfred Adler: The Man Who Understood Superheroes,” by [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Alfred Adler in California, 1936. A photo from the Adler University Archives, donated by Dr. Penny Silvers, Professor of Education, Dominican University (niece of Evelyn Feldman Roth, Adler’s secretary). Hoffman). You will enrich your knowledge in discussions by veteran Adlerian researchers and practitioners (“Adler’s Motivational Theory: An Historical Perspective on Belonging and the Fundamental Human Striving,” by Dreikurs Ferguson, and “Are Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs Relevant for Parents Today?,” by Bettner) as well as—in a brave attempt to swim in Adler as a river, quoting Richard E. Watts—by those who had different theoretical upbringings (“And They Lived Happily Ever After: An Intimate Closeness of Systems and Adlerian Theories in the Case of a Transgender Couple,” by Brown and co authors). You will enjoy writings by authors with a wide range of years devoted to studying Adlerian psychology, from graduate students (Londergan, a coauthor of “And They Lived Happily Ever After”) to professors with decades of Adlerian practice (“The Miracle of Early Recollections in Adlerian Psychotherapy and Supervision,” by Shifron, and “Adler’s Original Contributions to Psychology,” by Griffith and Maybell). You will revisit some unfinished philosophical business (“The Fourth and Fifth Life Tasks as Existential Challenges,” by Linden) and be invited to tackle new clinical challenges (“Adler’s Interview Questions: Incorporating Diversity and [End Page 2] Sociocultural Contexts Holistically,” by Johnson- Migalski and co authors). Though not named in any particular article, Adler University Senior Director of Library and Learning Services Ariel Orlov and students Noah DeBruyn, Neena Mathew, and Shannon Zofkie have contributed to this special issue in its many tasks, and so they belong to this issue, too. I would like to encourage you to read the authors’ biographies to grasp a full cultural experience of each author and to listen to the many accents fully present in this issue of the English-language journal—with authors from Austria, China, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, and many states in the United States. In doing so, please remember that Adler, too, spoke...

Psychopathology and the self: Human actors, agents, and authors.

The articles included within this special issue of the Journal of Personality all conceptualize psychopathology as the result of problems in human selfhood. As such, they implicate a wide assortment of self-related constructs, from self-objectification to self-esteem, in the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, and they point to interventions designed to alter these self-processes in order to alleviate suffering. In this commentary, I reinterpret and reorganize many of the ideas presented in the articles from the standpoint of a tripartite perspective on the reflexive human self. The self is first and foremost an inherent duality of I and Me. Psychologically speaking, the I/Me dynamic plays out in three different guises-the self as (1) social actor, (2) motivated agent, and (3) autobiographical author. Problems in human selfhood as they pertain to psychopathology may be profitably reconceived in terms of the corresponding performative styles expressed by social actors, the motivational agendas of values and goals that energize human striving and determine self-esteem, and the internalized life stories that human beings, as authors of the self, fashion and narrate to make sense of the reconstructed past and imagined future.

Is There Such a Thing as “Ultimate” Meaning? A Review of Fluid versus Fixed Models of Different Forms of Human Striving

ABSTRACTA growing number of social psychological theories have posited that meaning-striving can be compensated for across domains; threats in one area can simply be addressed by gains in another. Other models argue that not all forms of meaning are created equal; certain forms of striving trump other ones. This review compares the assertions made by these different models related to meaning to illustrate that (a) with few exceptions, fluidity is central to meaning, and (b) despite such consensus on the fluid nature of meaning, existing models diverge on the existence and nature of “ultimate” meanings. Future directions for the empirical study of meaning and methodological considerations are discussed.

Joel F. Harrington. The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century.

This is a wonderful book. Joel Harrington's amazing reconstruction of the life and times of Frantz Schmidt, executioner of Nuremberg, speaks to readers at every level, from specialists to students to general readers. Already known for his outstanding works of social history—most recently The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (2009)—Harrington is now addressing a still-larger audience. I thought this would be an easy review to write: “Great book, go read it!” But it's actually hard to find adequate words of praise. The most obvious excellence is the compelling story. Harrington has shaped his seemingly grim material—the life of a man whose bloody profession was as repellent to his contemporaries as it is to modern readers—into a tale of deeply human striving and pathos. From before Schmidt's birth, when his father was unwillingly thrust into the disreputable trade of executioner, to the later fates of the Schmidt offspring, Harrington artfully weaves the story of this remarkable individual together with the social history of his time and place.

Chapter 1 The Divine Comedy ’s Construction of Its Audience in Paradiso 2, lines 1–18

Chapter 1 The Divine Comedy’s Construction of Its Audience in Paradiso 2, lines 1–18 Jason Aleksander Prologue: An Unorthodox Orientation to Salvation Before I address the question of the apostrophe to the reader in Paradiso 2, it may prove helpful to give some orientation to my approach by briefly discussing the relationship between Paradiso 19’s and 20’s responses to the problem of reconciling divine justice with the orthodox Catholic creed “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” [no salvation outside the Church].1 In Paradiso 19, the Eagle of Divine Justice asks the pilgrim’s question for him: “ché tu dicevi ‘Un uom nasce a la rivade l’Indo, e quivi non è chi ragionidi Cristo né chi legga né chi scriva, e tutti suoi voleri e atti buonisono, quanto ragione umana vede,sanza peccato in vita o in sermoni. Muore non battezzato e sanza fede:ov’ è questa giustizia che ’l condanna?ov’ è la colpa sua se ei non crede?’”2 [“for you would say: ‘A man is born on the banks of the Indus, and no one is there to speak of Christ or read or write of him, and all his desires and acts are good, as far as human reason can see, without sin in life or in word. He dies unbaptized and without our faith: where is this justice that condemns him? where is his fault if he does not believe?’”] The Eagle’s initial and direct response to this question affirms (in a subjunctive and counterfactual conditional): [End Page 1] “Certo a colui che meco s’assottiglia,se la Scrittura sovra voi non fosse,da dubitar sarebbe a maraviglia.” (Paradiso 19, lines 82–84) [“Certainly for the one who matches wits with me, if the Scriptures were not over you, there would be wondrous cause for doubt.”] Nevertheless, the Eagle goes on to insist: “A questo regnonon salì mai chi non credette ‘n Cristo,né pria né poi ch’ el si chiavasse al legno.” (Paradiso 19, lines 103–5) [“To this kingdom no one has ever risen who did not believe in Christ, either before or after he was nailed to the wood.”] These passages pose an interpretive dilemma for us concerning the ways in which they might be read as a response to the doctrine of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. The two options seem to be as follows: either (a) the Eagle is suggesting that the temporal institution of the Church provides the only efficacious means of stimulating human striving for salvation, or (b) the Eagle’s comment requires us to understand Ecclesia as something other than the temporal institution of the Church. The reasons by which we are forced to reject the first of these two interpretive possibilities are obvious. In the first place, I can think of no work of Dante’s that any serious reader (let alone Dante himself) has ever cast as claiming or as illustrating the claim that the efficacy of the Church as a political institution legitimizes either its function in the political arena or its role in the spiritual development of its flock. Quite to the contrary, nobody seriously doubts the sincerity of the Divine Comedy’s many explicit criticisms (most pointed, perhaps, in Purgatorio 16) of the temporal Church for the harm it does to human strivings when it debases itself by being too involved in mundane matters. But beyond these general reasons to reject the first interpretive possibility, in the very next canto, the pilgrim discovers that two of the souls that compose parts of the Eagle’s eyebrow are the Roman emperor Trajan, who, through a miracle, was resurrected after his death so that he could convert to Christianity, and the Trojan warrior Ripheus, who is known to us only because of the briefest of mentions in Virgil’s Aeneid. In short, Dante’s positioning of these souls—along with Cato’s puzzling appearance as the first soul encountered in Purgatorio—forces us to accept the conclusion that, in the Divine Comedy, participation in the Church as a political and therefore also as a historical institution is in no way necessary for salvation. But what, then, are we to make...

From Tacit Knowing to a Theory of Faith

From Tacit Knowing to a Theory of Faith

Hegelian madness? Nikolaj Fëdorov’s repudiation of history

Nikolaj Fedorov insists that the proper end of the philosophical project must be the repudiation of history in the creation of a new being not subject to death. This project appears to be an extension of the kind of philosophical madness one might associate with the Platonic striving for synoptic vision of the whole. Federov develops this notion of philosophy, not in dialogue with Plato, however, as much as with the Hegelian notion of the end of human striving in absolute knowledge, the final unity of will and reason, which Fedorov criticizes. The exceptional radicality of Fedorov’s philosophical project as a project of divinization, as well as its flaws, are most clearly manifest in the Russian context with reference to two other crucial projects of divinization deeply influenced by Hegel: that of Vladimir Solov’ev and Alexandre Kojeve.

Shamed Guiltless:

Shamed Guiltless:

Revisiting Ernest Becker’s Psychology of Human Striving

Ernest Becker’s psychology of human striving is a unique blend of pragmatic, post-Freudian, and existential thought that explicates central features of the human condition and experience. It is both a psychological and philosophical anthropology. In consequence, despite being mostly ignored by psychologists, Becker’s work continues to be relevant, even instructive, to past and more recent attempts to formulate a psychology of personhood, especially one that focuses on the interactivity of persons within their biophysical and sociocultural contexts. What is offered here is an integrative explication of Becker’s psychology of human striving that merges important aspects of his early and later work and points to critical considerations and possible extensions of his ideas.

“Paradox lust”: the fortunate fall according to Joyce in finnegans wake

A half century ago Atherton started cataloguing the plethora of books in the Wake, and fifteen years ago Hogan concentrated on Milton’s work among those furnishing more potent, complex, and extended allusions. Not since Rabelais’s, Cervantes’s, Sterne’s, and Goethe’s fictions, which demonstrated how to journey through vast realms of culture and paradigmatic literature, has any author acted with such sovereign freedom as Joyce to align a convergence of all books and language over the ages with his own search for wisdom. The fact that Joyce achieved a very personal synthesis out of the referential immensity adduced in the Wake should not deter us from recognizing certain deep patterns which qualify Joyce as a renewer of important tradition. The patterns of concern here as encountered in Joyce finally carry us over into experiencing a kind of “modern mysticism” that is not exclusively apophatic but also simultaneously directly affirmative, although not explainable in any routine discursive fashion. Joyce’s idea of a divine creative principle that appears to “fall” in the course of bringing forth its own purpose in a “creation” has an honorable place in theological, cosmogonic, and mystical thought in the European tradition. A number of Renaissance savants and poets believed that various paradigms embodied in ancient myth, including the biblical story of Adam and Eve, reflected this proposition. Several streams feeding from the Renaissance over Romanticism into Modernism and interesting to Joyce (e.g., early anthropological myth analysis, cabala, theosophy, etc.) kept alive the poetic vocabulary by which to express an encounter with the baffling puzzle of Being as a drama played out by the human race, an evolutionary drama with both historical and psychological dimensions. Joyce’s contemporary, Thomas Mann, while quite different in many respects, shares Joyce’s perception that a parallelism exists between the “fall” of Being or Spirit, the “agon” of human development, and the problem of a seemingly absurd mind/body division. Although keen interest in poets like Blake, the heroic power of the imagination, and the Luciferic theme is prominent in Ulysses, a movement occurs in the Wake away from the Bildungsroman structure toward a more encompassing visionary sense of rebirth. In the Wake Joyce “revises” the Miltonic version of the fall (as well as the Dantesque and others) in a way consonant with Goethe’s revision of the meaning of the recorded three millennia of human striving in Faust II; the Goethean coda anticipates Joyce in “fulfilling” the inner tendency which surfaces from the biblical account of the family romance onward and appears instantiated repeatedly in the world theater/history. Joyce’s version abandons the apocalyptic model of a once-only creation and privileges the alternate model of an eternal or permanent universe, but according to Joyce the repeatable story of the “fortunate fall” eventuates in a requisite salvational insight suited to the Viconian “eternal return”: in the words of the mother, “first we feel, then we fall”. Joyce reinvents the basic sacraments poetically to reflect the ultimate union of creator and creation, and the Wake’s famous coda confirms the sacred mission and destiny of love’s “body” (which is also by analogy the text’s body or embodiment).

Getting from Here to There

The task of translation is obviously impossible. But since we are the kind of creature that is programmed to succeed at failure, we are constantly propelled forward toward transcendence of limitation. Translation is the paradigm of all human striving, doomed to failure yet married to desire, and is therefore the inescapable expression of being human.

Excess

Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugar-plantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community's evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure.

&lt;i&gt;Striving with Grace: Views of Free Will in Anglo-Saxon England&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Striving with Grace: Views of Free Will in Anglo-Saxon England Jonathan Wilcox Striving with Grace: Views of Free Will in Anglo-Saxon England. By Aaron J. Kleist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. xvii + 420. $90. This is a book based on an appealing premise—to pursue a single important theological idea across the complexity of writings in Anglo-Saxon England—which is fulfilled with notable success. Teasing through the complexity of theological thought that has accrued on the distinction between striving and grace, Aaron Kleist lays out the thought of three patristic writers, Augustine, Gregory, and Bede, and four Anglo-Saxon authors they influenced. Kleist uses source study and manuscript evidence along with close reading to make a contribution to the history of ideas, uncovering the subtlety of thought of some of the most important named authors of Anglo-Saxon England—Alfred, perhaps Wulfstan, and Ælfric, as well as the lesser-known Lantfred of Winchester. The result is a deeply informed theological study that provides insight into the thought world of Anglo-Saxon England. The issue of merit vs. grace, or the role of human volition in distinction to the capacities given by the creator, is a hugely important one for Christian thought, leading quickly to consideration of the source of evil, the extent of human freedom [End Page 533] of will, and the conundrum of predetermination. Differences within the debate are often rather subtle, yet small distinctions mattered a lot with various unsuccessful views condemned as heresies. Manichean, Donatist, Pelagian, and Semi-Pelagian positions are sketched out with admirable clarity and economy by Kleist, who shows how underlying all the discussion is a delicate pas de deux between striving and grace, freedom of will and divine determinism. Kleist presents in a few pages Augustine’s evolving position, which was to become orthodoxy despite his perhaps surprising extreme emphasis on grace over merit. Gregory, Kleist shows, gives a bit more weight to human striving, while Bede, despite repeatedly stressing grace, provides yet more emphasis on human merit in striving. Kleist shows how the work of all three fathers circulated in Anglo-Saxon England and suggests they provide a range of orthodox options for subsequent writers to draw on. Bede plays a pivotal role as both a father of the church and a thinker within Anglo-Saxon England, and the remainder of this study focuses on theological positions in England. Kleist briefly moves away from explicitly Christian theological work to consider Boethius’ Neoplatonic Consolation of Philosophy, which includes prominent consideration of the source of evil and the nature of free will, a work that famously circulated in an Alfredian translation. Kleist considers how the work is Christianized through the commentary traditions, explaining in part its huge popularity in the Middle Ages, and considers anew the famous image of the axle and the idea of divine foreknowledge within the Old English translation, which turns out to present a largely Augustinian position on grace. Kleist then turns to an altogether less familiar work, Lantfred of Winchester’s Carmen de libero arbitrio, a poem on free will by a probably Frankish monk who visited Winchester in association with the Benedictine reform, which, Kleist shows, pulls away from Augustine’s emphasis on prevenient grace to embrace a Semi-Pelagian heresy in its emphasis on human volition. Kleist then considers a Latin sermon preserved in Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gamle Kongelige Sammlung 1595, a work either composed by or strongly associated with Wulfstan the Homilist. Most of Wulfstan’s vernacular writings paint with too broad a brush to allow Kleist to position the archbishop in relation to the debates on free will, but this Latin sermon, Kleist shows, draws on a book of Cassian’s Collationes that was central to the Semi-Pelagian heresy and condemned on that account. Despite that source, the theology of the Wulfstanian sermon sounds mostly unexceptionable, apparently by simply avoiding those parts of the Collatio that had been condemned as heretical by Prosper of Aquitaine. Nevertheless, it perpetrates Semi-Pelagian thought in just the way a homilist might be expected to, by stressing the individual’s responsibility for repentance where, Kleist suggests, Augustine would have insisted...

Polemic and Nostalgia: Medieval Crosscurrents in Spenser’s Allegory of Pride

This essay recasts the perennial question of Spenser’s Protestantism as a question of literary influence: how does The Faerie Queene’s nostalgia for medieval representational systems qualify its effectiveness as Reformation polemic? Book I’s sequential anatomies of pride in Redcrosse’s encounters first with Lucifera and then with Orgoglio suggest the inadequacy of pre-Reformation confidence in human striving. Redcrosse more or less escapes the threat posed by the Seven Deadly Sins—a topos that would have already looked antiquated to Spenser’s late sixteenth-century readers—but falls captive to a more comprehensive, ultimately more Protestant, figuration of pride as a misguided trust in the natural man. Yet this is only the first half of a complex intertextual story. As the second section of the essay suggests, the diptychal analysis of pride is itself sufficiently indebted to pre-Reformation commentaries to qualify Book I’s denigration of the medieval past as a period of unmitigated error.

Book Review: Life goals and well-being: Towards a positive psychology of human striving

Book Review: Life goals and well-being: Towards a positive psychology of human striving