Kind Of Self Research Articles

Hegel, Selbstischkeit, and the experiential self

ABSTRACT In this essay, I offer a corrective to the standard reading of Hegel as a social constructivist when it comes to matters of the self by shifting the focus from the Phenomenology to his ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ and ‘Anthropology.’ There, a kind-of self or Selbstischkeit is revealed, anticipating the pre-reflective, experiential of the likes of Zahavi and, by extension, Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Hegel's conception of the self enhances our understanding of the relationship between the pre-reflective, experiential self and the self of self-consciousness, contributing to the discourse on the continuity between biological and mental life. The self, as it emerges in consciousness, traces its origins to a primarily bodily selfness which is foundational to psychical life. Habit emerges as a vital bridge between this selfness and the self of self-consciousness, offering a dynamic, dialectical framework for thinking the development of the self of self-consciousness in and out of its bodily context.

On feeling unable to continue as oneself

AbstractThis paper sets out a phenomenological account of what it is to feel unable to continue as oneself. I distinguish the feeling that a particular identity has become unsustainable from a sense that the world has ceased to offer the kinds of possibilities required to sustain any such identity. In feeling unable to continue as oneself, possibilities may remain for carrying on in practically meaningful ways but not as who one is or was. I reflect on the kinds of self and feeling involved in such experiences, emphasizing the essential openness of self‐experience to transformative possibilities and the dynamic structure of feeling. To illustrate and further develop my approach, I turn to experiences of grief.

What Kind of Self Can a Pupil’s Letter Reveal? The Tarbut School in Nowy Dwór, 1934–1935

What Kind of Self Can a Pupil’s Letter Reveal? The Tarbut School in Nowy Dwór, 1934–1935

Embodied Experience of Gender and Self in Transnational Migration from Nepal

In their efforts to seek employment and income abroad, these days, people leave their place of origin and move to new places through transnational migration. In that sense, transnational migration can be taken as liberating or escaping from the existing context. While looking at certain inherent procedures of transnational migration, it can be questioned whether people can escape from their social and cultural web and conditions through this process. In this sense, transnational migration reinstates and reflects prevailing social norms and values concerning gender, class, and well-being. On top of this, based on ethnographic information, this paper also highlights the process that reflects their embodied experience of border crossing, and thus transnational migration embodies the process of gender and a particular kind of self.

Population of entities with three individual states and asymmetric interactions

In various applications in life and social sciences the agents of a complex system, which can be individuals of a sub–populations, can have one of the few inner states or can choose one of few strategies. Their states are effects of interactions with other agents. Behavior is described by a kinetic–like a nonlinear equation. In the present paper, we study the behavior of solutions in the case of three possible states and show that in some cases a kind of self–organization occurs but in others, a periodic behavior characterizes the system. We can observe a wide variety of dynamics that can relate to the behavior of real systems. The model contains a natural interaction intensity parameter γ≥1. Case γ>1 leads to “very” nonlinear structures. We prove that the system has no non–constant periodic solutions. We propose conditions guaranteeing the asymptotic stability of equilibrium points on the boundary that corresponds to the asymptotic extinction of two states. Moreover, conditions for the uniqueness and instability of an inner equilibrium point, corresponding to an asymptotic presence of all states, are formulated. The case of γ=1 with asymmetric interaction rate is studied as well. Possible complex behavior of solutions can reflect the possible complex performance of systems with asymmetric interactions — typical e.g. in Economy and some applications in Biology.

Representation of Self-Concept in the Collection of Children's Stories from Bobo Magazine

As construction of thought, self-concept will continue to grow and develop following the life experiences, one of which can come from stories. Therefore, this study aims to uncover and describe indicators of self-concept from children's stories. The data was obtained based on ten children's stories from the online version of Bobo magazine published in 2019-2020. This research used the content analysis method with categorization and tabulation until inference was found. The results revealed that Bobo magazine had implied self-concepts in the published stories. Among them, such as self-identity related to the labels attached by other characters as well as the character's desire to be what kind of self; personal behavior related to the views of other characters and figures in viewing their behavior; and self-judgment related to the acceptance or rejection of the character's behavior. Then, the physical self-concept associated with gender and character skills; moral self-concept related to the character's ability to control his behavior; personal self-concept related to good relations between characters; family self-concept related to the character's relationship with his family members; and social self-concept related to the character's relationship with his peers. These findings appear to confirm the representation of self-concepts in Indonesian children's short stories.

Wordsworth’s Self-Composure

Abstract This essay examines William Wordsworth’s attraction to fractious and perplexing selfhood. Attending to the often overlooked riches of the Cornell edition of Wordsworth’s poetry, I argue that the poet’s sense of the self is more than a straightforward aspiration towards organic creation. Recent scholarship has cast Wordsworth’s processes of revision as an effort to create continuity between his past and present selves. Memory, in this respect, becomes an instrument to invest back into original moments of creation. It is my contention that Wordsworth is instead fascinated by a self that cannot be drawn together neatly. I also consider the psychological contexts of Wordsworth’s writing. Contemporary theorizations of memory were sometimes too quick in reforming the fragmentary aspects of memory into a positive state of unity. Wordsworth’s poetic and compositional practices, then, challenge the stricter divisions in the eighteenth century between undesirable and splintered forms of selfhood and the more unified kinds of self, which usually rely on fulfilling a telos. Teleological views of selfhood, in Wordsworth’s eyes, are insufficient to account for the contingencies and happenstance that are natural and attractive aspects of experience. As this essay suggests, his practice of revision often thrives on the unpredictable elements of composition and drawn on by an attraction to the unknown.

Seeing the appearing world: René Arcilla's pedagogy of availability

In this essay I argue, first, that René Arcilla's project in his book Wim Wenders's Road Movies: Education without Learning, can be understood as an effort to draw the reader away from a conception of personhood grounded in the Enlightenment and towards an expressive-romantic conception. Yet the sense of the person to which Arcilla leads the reader alters the Romantic conception considerably. Arcilla is attentive not only to how a disengaged, instrumental and fragmented approach to life can lead one astray but also to how a highly individualised search for authenticity and truth can sever one's connection to others and the world. In his proposal for a certain kind of education, Arcilla transcends and yet retains key components of the individualism that has troubled so many critics of both strands of the modern identity. The second argument of this essay is that a distinct pedagogical approach can be detected in Arcilla's text, one that is aligned with his conception of the kind of self into which the reader is being educated. In essence, Arcilla enacts the shifted conception of education that his book describes.

Climate change action as a project of identity: Eight meta-analyses

Identity can improve our understanding of personal climate action, particularly when climate action becomes an expression of a person’s self. However, it is unclear which kind of self or identity is most relevant. Building on a comprehensive series of eight meta-analyses (using data from 188 published articles, N = 414,282 participants) this research systematically compares how strongly climate-friendly intentions and behaviors are associated with place identity, personal connectedness to nature, environmental self-identity (i.e., personal self-definition as a pro-environmentally acting person), and social identity (i.e., identification with social groups). Results suggest robust, medium-sized to strong links of both pro-environmental intentions and behaviors to people’s nature connectedness (r = 0.44/0.52), environmental self-identity (r = 0.62/0.56), and identification with groups considered to support climate-friendly behavior (r = 0.48/0.51), but markedly weaker effects for identification with groups which are unrelated to environmental topics (r = 0.30/0.15) and for place identity (r = 0.18/0.32). Implications for policy interventions and psychological theory are discussed.

Research on Construction Method of Self-Compacting Concrete with Machine-Made Sand

Machine-made sand self-compacting concrete is a kind of self compacting concrete with machine-made sand as fine aggregate, which could fill formwork only by its own gravity, without concrete vibration. It is different from ordinary concrete in many aspects, such as fluidity, workability, and configuration method[1]. As a new type of concrete material, machine-made sand self-compacting concrete mix ratio has been studied in depth by many scholars. However, there are relatively few researches on the practical application of machine-made sand self-compacting concrete, especially on construction methods. This paper discusses the characteristics and construction differences between machine-made sand self-compacting concrete and ordinary concrete, and proposes a special construction method for machine-made sand self-compacting concrete.

Freedom under Paramountcy: Đa gi năng Traders as Active Moral Agents in Late-socialist Vietnam

Building on fieldwork between 2012–2019 in a northern Vietnamese village, this article documents the striking ways villagers have dealt with an enduring concern of those who inhabit the complex moral world of post-/ late-socialism: how to handle choices that involve thinking and acting like neoliberal subjects. I focus on a relatively undocumented livelihood strategy villagers call đa gi năng, a term with striking moral connotations that means “keeping multiple livelihood strategies and never putting all eggs in one basket.” This strategy is inspired by a locally specific reference point: the well-being of the family, perceived in Xuan as both the achievement of substantial material improvements for the family and the protection of its hard-won security against unpredictable state policies. It is this reference point that grants villagers remarkable moral freedom, both to actively pursue substantial material comfort for the family by means of rational market calculations and independent decisions without being troubled by moral frameworks that treat neoliberalism as problematic, and to evade with explicit moral confidence the state’s push to fully embrace neoliberal spirits and commit everything to a single profitable yet risky enterprise. I argue that the well-being of the family is the paramount moral value in Xuan. While the existing scholarship has focused mostly on how paramount values facilitate cultural reproduction of a Durkheimian kind, this article shows that the family as the paramount value can grant freedom. Although subjects are confined within the moral domain the paramount value creates, it is within that confined space that they can find the freedom to choose the kind of self they wish to be.

Understanding the self of people with dementia : Psychological and philosophical considerations.

BackgroundThe ability to create and maintain an ongoing life narrative is a key characteristic of what makes us human; however, people with dementia lose this ability in the course of the disease. If the notion of having a self is intimately linked with being able to create and maintain a life narrative and if people with dementia tend to lose this ability, what kind of self do people with dementia still possess?Objective and methodsRecent theories developed in psychology and philosophy suggest that at least two notions of the self have to be distinguished: the experiencing self and the remembering self. This distinction is applied to people with dementia.ResultsWhile the remembering self is impaired in people with dementia, their experiencing self remains relatively intact. Critically, the experiencing self is a self with inner depth, mirroring the life history of the individual. Thus, the self of people with dementia is not unextended in time. Although people with dementia may have lost the ability to tell a story about their life, they are still able to express this story in their behavior.ConclusionUnderstanding the structure of the self of people with dementia can help guide interactions as well as the designing of appropriate interventions and environments. Moreover, realizing the inner depth of the self of people with dementia may help acknowledge their dignity and personhood.

A kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self: Agency and the Insulin pump

This article examines the interaction between the Insulin pump, a biotechnology device used to treat type one diabetes, and the human to whom it is attached. It asks what kinds of selves the pump–human entanglement constitutes, and how these subjectivities shift the lived experience of agency. This article takes an auto-ethnographic approach, whereby the author marshals her own experiences as an Insulin pump–human entanglement to demonstrate her arguments. Ultimately, the article contends that being a pump–human entanglement entails an embodied cyborg subjectivity. This subjectivity produces an agent that, while structured in particular ways by entanglement with this technology, is ultimately more active in the mutual care accorded to her illness.

Binary Model of the Dynamics of Active versus Passive Mindfulness in Managing Depression

Background: Meditation has developed over many centuries within a diverse range of religious traditions including Middle-Eastern, Indian, and East-Asian. Of these, mindfulness meditation from the Buddhist (Indian) tradition, has been the most extensively adopted in the Western secular world primarily with applications in health and well-being as pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Review: While originally developed to treat chronic pain and stress in the U.S., mindfulness training was later coupled with cognitive-behavioral therapy to treat depression in the U.K. and beyond. The present review of the literature confirms the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in these medical applications. The various models of mindfulness that have been advanced in the literature are here reviewed and are shown to be based on an underlying unitary model of the human psyche. By contrast, the present model distinguishes between two modes of mindfulness, an active form and a passive form. Theory: The structural foundations of these two modes of mindfulness are established types of self within the psyche, namely, the ‘intra self’ (underpinning ‘active mindfulness’) and the ‘supra self’ (underpinning ‘passive mindfulness’). The binary model advanced here shows how these two kinds of self (and their corresponding modes of mindfulness) can form the basis of an effective approach to managing depression. Application: By combining both cognitive decentering using active mindfulness and existential disidentification using passive mindfulness, individuals can learn to manage their cognitive dysfunction and distorted self-identity and thereby reduce the effects of depression in their lives. A design for an empirical study is provided to test the model.

A Relational Approach to the Digital Self: Plus-Sized Bloggers and the Double-Edged Sword of Market-Compromised Identity

A Relational Approach to the Digital Self: Plus-Sized Bloggers and the Double-Edged Sword of Market-Compromised Identity

The Texts and Subjects of Automediality

Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their field defining work Reading Autobiography, offer an etymological cue that summarises the prevailing use and perception of autobiographical work: "in Greek, autos denotes 'self,' bios 'life,' and graphe 'writing.' Taken together in this order, the words self life writing offer a brief definition of the autobiography" (1). If "autobiography" has denoted a way to write the self from the location of the self, automediality points to the range of media forms and technologies through which people engage in digital, visual, filmic, performative, textual, and transmediated forms of documenting, constructing and presenting the self.

Virtual Trauma: Prospects for Automediality

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes...

Self and others

ABSTRACTWhat is the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of others? And how do we develop an understanding of others and ourselves? In this paper, I will argue that our sense of self is thoroughly social even though self-knowledge is not based on the same kind of evidence as knowledge of others. Moreover, I will suggest that we need to distinguish between different kinds of self- and other-understanding: some are based on procedural knowledge or knowing-how and involve an implicit representation of self or other, while others involve conceptual abilities. I will conclude with some considerations regarding the role of the second-person perspective in structuring the development of the concept of ourselves and others as persons.

On the Coherence ofPlato's Philosophers

AbstractBecausePlato's Philosophers:The Coherence of the Dialoguesis such a monumental book, understanding its own coherence is a daunting task. The dialogueTheaetetushas as its theme the problem of knowledge, and so the part ofPlato's Philosophersthat deals with theTheaetetusseems a promising place to begin to think through what Zuckert's book means to be as a whole. In theTheaetetuswe learn how knowledge, as a story that must begin and unfold for us in time, while necessarily partial, provides indirect, if imperfect, access to the whole and leads to a kind of self- knowledge. Plato makes this self-knowledge, the true goal of philosophy, most fully manifest in the drama of the life of his philosopher, Socrates, to whichPlato's Philosophers, in meticulously tracing the dramatic order of the dialogues, means to provide access.

Hearing Everything at Once and Listening to Nothing: The Acedia of Absence

The title for this article by John Main O.S.B. is meant to evoke the sheer disorientation of our contemporary culture. Strikingly, he wrote it before the flowering of our pressure-inducing, digitally demanding and often indigestible world. The psychologist and social scientist Sherry Turkle talks about our drowning in what she describes as the ‘volume and velocity’ of our lives today. The amount, sound and speed of our lives, however, is not without consequence. This article attempts to explore some of that cost to us at a personal level. One way of capturing it is through the experience of acedia described and transmitted in the 4th century by Evagrius and Cassian. It is the experience of a deep disjuncture within ourselves which quite often simply outwits us. Two millennia later Andre Louf and Thomas Merton among others, pick this up as a description of modernity and the kind of self it forms, for the religious and non-religious alike. This article, while admitting that paradox, makes reference to examples in literature, the social sciences, philosophy and childhood and invites the reader to consider acedia as a new common language for dialogue.