Modern Self Research Articles

La interpersonalidad en Karol Wojtyla (II)

The “philosophers of dialogue” discovered, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that the constitution of the modern self required the presence of a you. The discovery of the need for a you opened up different philosophical positions: some maintained the priority of the you over the I; others the priority of the we over the you and over the I; still others the priority of the personal subject over the interpersonal relationship. This text aims to explain Wojtyla’s position on this issue and why. The Polish philosopher maintains the priority of the personal subject over the relationship and, at the same time, that the I is constituted or realized through the you (the man through the woman and the woman through the man) and in the we. Thanks to the discovery of the subjective dimension of the person, Wojtyla discovers categories such as “self-determination”, “self-control”, “self-giving”, “psyche”, “soma”, etc., which are constitutive of the person and which we could not find in an anthropology that began with the you or the we. Furthermore, starting with the community seems to call into question personal freedom. On the other hand, Wojtyla maintains that the you and the we are absolutely necessary for the full realization of the self as a person. Through joint (good) action, one realizes oneself and, at the same time, others.

Designing a Modern Self: The English Travels of Pandita Ramabai and Krishnabhabini Das

In 1882, Krishnabhabini Das travelled to England and wrote a travelogue, Englandey Bangamahila (A Bengali Lady in England) in Bengali. A year later in 1883, Pandita Ramabai also travelled to England and wrote a letter in Marathi describing her travel experiences, which was later published as Englandcha Pravas (Travel to England). This article reads the two travel accounts together and in relation to one another aiming to compare and juxtapose their differing and at times overlapping navigations and negotiations with the West in an attempt to understand the early expression of gendered subjectivities via narratives of travel at a time when both travel and writing by women were discouraged, if not proscribed. With a focus on two related aspects—(1) the textual construction of the ‘self’ and (2) the trope of the reverse female gaze on the West—the paper argues that these travel writings produce as they record the making of distinct modern female subjectivities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Rousseau, American Laicite, and the Future of Religious Liberty in America

Abstract There is a growing cultural tension between religious orthodoxy and the prevailing form of progressivism which centers the modern self in such a way that would please the eighteenth-century Romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau’s priority of the self led him to embrace a particular view of church and state as well as religious liberty, which, if implemented, would be a new experiment in the American context. What are the implications of this ascendant version of progressivism for religious liberty as it has been understood in the American context, vacillating as it has in the past between strict separation or accommodation? What would the emerging progressivism do with religious liberty given its philosophical commitments to a this-worldly immanent frame and rise of the psychologized self (expressive individualism)? I argue that religious liberty, in its robust paradigmatic American form, cannot survive any of these outcomes without undergoing radical redefinition, and instead a new paradigm of religious liberty, which I call American Laïcité, must replace the older version. With American Laïcité, as Rousseau would have it, though religion is a rather fixed aspect of human nature, only religion that sacralizes the immanent, one centered on self-expression and never practices or teaches any form of exclusivism or inequality can expect to be either accommodated or tolerated within society.

Modernity and Disenchantment: Charles Taylor on the Identity of the Modern Self

In his magnum opus, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), Charles Taylor gives an exhaustive and teleologically interpretive history of the modern self. He, in fact, is in search of the core of the modern identity. By ‘identity’ Taylor means the ensemble of the understanding of what is to be a ‘human agent’, a ‘person’, a ‘self’. Taylor in generating the ontology of the self is greatly inspired by the understanding of Dasein in Heidegger. This paper also focuses on how Taylor uses Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the self in several ways to give to modernity a base that is not Cartesian. Taylor’s central argument is ‘how the assertion of the modern individual has spawned an erroneous understanding (identity) of the self’, where one experiences a loss of horizon. He has turned our attention, more than anyone else, towards the communitarian constitution of the self, and pointed out the limitations of insights within liberal individualism. For Taylor, as for early Heidegger, the self is not neutral or atomic. The self exists only in terms of questions and constitutive concerns, and it is not amenable to arbitrary determination, but can be made sense of only in terms of its life as a whole at any moment.

Turning Back Time to Keep Writing

Abstract This paper addresses the “regressive” temporality of melancholic memory that developed cross-culturally within the modern, predominantly progress-oriented time-consciousness. Outlining the theoretical—Freudian and post-Freudian—perspective on melancholia, this essay continues with a case study of a text that embodies a particularly “regressive” response to a personal loss, Bruno Schulz's short story “Sanatorium pod klepsydrą” [Sanatorium under the sign of the hourglass, 1937]. My reading of this short story will be structured around the narrator's “trick” of turning back time, motivated by his willingness to keep the memory of his lost loved one, his father, alive. For Freud, such a “trick” indicates the failure to mourn, which results in the pathologic condition of melancholia. I will argue, however, that the narrator deliberately refuses to “work through” his grief because it is precisely through this circular and infinite regression that he explores his creative abilities and shapes his fluid modernist self. My analysis is particularly focused on the dynamic boundaries between the “real” and imaginary spaces that the narrator constructs, balancing and at the same time de-stabilizing the notions of separation and encounter, distance and immersion, determinacy and freedom. As I will show, through this process the narrator finds himself in between two realities, in a point of suspension, which becomes the only possible position or, rather, condition for modernist, hyper-reflexive writing.

Calvin, Rabelais, and the platonic tradition: cognition of god and the self in renaissance and modernity

In Sociology of Religion the massive shift towards secularisation, especially in historically Protestant countries of Europe, or these with Protestant influence, has been found to comprise two shifts: one towards the loss of religion, the other towards highly individualistic esoteric spirituality. The ‘individualisation of faith’, brought about by Protestantism, proclaimed especially by John Calvin, as ‘master theoretician’, is regarded to be a feature of both. Yet, presently, Protestantism and Western Esotericism, define themselves as opposites. At the beginning of this development, in the 16th century Renaissance culture, Platonism, (understood as spiritual philosophy) had a formative influence on both. In this essay, I will look at the origins of this development, at Calvin’s introduction to his theoretical exposition of Christian faith, the ‘Institutes’, and at Francois Rabelais’ references to ‘divination’ – the means of finding out the will of God – as a foremost literary representative of the spiritual tradition that was to become Western Esotericism. I will show, that both are close in their sharing of the Platonic motif that the knowledge of God and of the Self are interconnected – despite their differing reception of it. Thus, ‘common ground’ is identified, that may help to understand the present dynamics between both, in the context of Modernity.

Book Review: The rise and triumph of the modern self by Carl R Trueman

Book Review: <i>The rise and triumph of the modern self</i> by Carl R Trueman

Education and the Cultivation of the Early Modern Self: Cultura Animi as Self-Care in Juan Luis Vives

AbstractDoes the modern self still need self-care? Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault and others suggested that self-care mostly disappeared with the advent of modernity. How this happened, or whether self-care instead took on new forms, is still not well understood. This article examines the Renaissance appropriation of the concept of a “culture of the soul” (cultura animi) as a marker for how self-care was adapted to modernity. After detailing how Cicero used cultura animi as a metaphor for self-care, I study the appropriation of this concept by the humanist Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), who made it into a central notion for his educational reform. I argue that, for Vives, self-care does not consist in the following of rules, precepts or “technologies of the self”; it is not a philosophical “art of living”. Instead, “culture” stands for an organic way of learning, a practice of absorbing multifarious experience, especially though the study of historical literature. Accordingly, the “self” to be cultivated is not one’s individual ego or transcendent soul, but one’s practical judgment. Education, centered on the cultivation of practical wisdom, is essential for self-care and for the flourishing of community.

Carl R. Trueman. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

KEYWORDS:

The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant , by Felix Ó Murchadha

The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant , by Felix Ó Murchadha

한국사회 반개신교 현상의 해석학: 팽창적 절대성과 현대적 자아의 충돌

이 글은 우리 사회의 반(反)개신교 현상에 주목한다. 개신교와 관련하여 조그마한 소재 하나라도 던져지면 금방 온라인 공간은 화약고에 불이 붙은 듯 폭발적인 적대의 현장으로 전화하는 것이 현실이다. 이처럼 뚜렷한 갈등 현상으로서 한국 개신교에 적대하는 흐름은 이미 낯설지 않은 우리 사회의 단면이 되었고, 그것은 새로운 사회갈등의 진원으로서 바야흐로 현재진행형이다. 우리는 바로 여기에 초점을 맞춰 그 원인과 작동 메커니즘을 이론 및 역사의 차원에서 규명하고자 하였다. 이 연구는 반개신교 현상을 종교장 내에서 발현되는 독특한 감정 아비투스의 산물로 정의하는데서 출발하였다. 그런 다음 반개신교 현상이 왜 생겨나는지를 개념적으로 파악하기 위해 한국 개신교를 팽창적 절대성이라는 이념형으로 규정하고, 이 팽창적 절대성을 감각적 차원과 접합된 한국인의 현대적 자아와 대비시켜 설명하였다. 그 핵심은 현대적 자아의 중핵이라고 할 수 있는 자율성, 그리고 그것을 이루는 개별적 자아 감각에 대한 팽창적 절대성의 침범이 바로 오늘날 한국사회 종교장 내 반개신교 갈등의 진원이라는 것이다.

Factors Affecting Parents' Intention of Sending Children to Study Abroad: A Study From Vietnam

&lt;p style="text-align: justify;"&gt;In recent years, there is a growing number of Vietnamese students applying to study abroad at a younger age. Instead of waiting until adulthood, many Vietnamese parents decide to send their offspring to study abroad early from high school. This study was conducted to analyze the factors affecting the intention of Vietnamese parents to send their children to study abroad. The dataset includes 350 responses, in which parents of middle and high school students having the intention and willingness to send their children to study abroad are respondents. The research results show that perceived value, perceived risk, and three variables of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) model affect the intention to send their children to study abroad with the ability of explanation 53.4%. In detail, Attitude (influenced by Success, Modern self, and Traditional self) has the most significant influence (30.9%) on the dependent variable. On that basis, some suggestions are proposed for international educational organizations and study-abroad counseling centers to help them give the right orientation to Vietnamese parents about studying-abroad. Besides, proposing some recommendations for domestic educational institutions, international educational institutions, and educational management agencies in Vietnam, in order to improve the quality of education and training, creating an ideal learning environment that meets international standards for students, and simultaneously attracting international students to Vietnam.&lt;/p&gt;

How to Cultivate the Modern Self: Development of the Concept of Mental Discipline in the University History of the United States

The development of the concept of mental discipline can be understood from three clues, as a puritanical phenomenon, as a phenomenon rooted in the classics, and, on the other hand, as one rooted in faculty psychology. The aim of this research is to explore whether there has been a fracture in the evolution of the concept of mental discipline and explain how and why it evolved in three stages. Centered on three figures, Timothy Dwight, William Torrey Harris, and Irving Babbitt, it can be found that mental discipline evolved into three contexts during its development. Harris’s ideas, to a large extent, reflected his absorption of the ideas of Hegelianism and the transcendental philosophy of Kant, and they also included Unitarianism. Babbitt hoped to solve the problem of how the general will formed by the individual of modern society not only guaranteed the public interest but also avoided excessively eroded individual spiritual freedom. Babbitt’s issue horizon was similar to that of Harris, but they slightly differed. A brief overview of the research may imply that, using the perspective of intellectual history, mental discipline is no longer regarded as a static and continuous ideal but as a concept embedded in different contexts and facing different issue horizons.

The Master’s Fall: The Fall of the Bourgeoisie Through the Fall of Patriarchy

The Master’s Fall: The Fall of the Bourgeoisie Through the Fall of Patriarchy

Review of: The Rise &amp; Triumph of the Modern Self

Review of: The Rise &amp; Triumph of the Modern Self

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman

Reviewed by: The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman Robert Benne The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. By Carl Trueman. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2020. 425 pp. Carl Trueman is one of America’s most important rising Christian public intellectuals. Scottish born and educated, Trueman is currently professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. Earlier he taught at the Ministerial Training Institute of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. His columns are published regularly in Public Discourse and First Things. Most importantly, he has written several significant books, including The Creedal Imperative (2012) and Luther on the Christian Life (2015). I taught the latter in an adult class at church and found it very well-written and informative. Though an orthodox Presbyterian, he is almost persuaded by Luther on the liturgy and sacraments. Trueman starts with the assessment of the modern self by two major theorists, Philip Rieff and Charles Taylor, both of whom see “expressive individualism” as the essence of the modern self. The modern self is no longer guided by the sacred order of great religions, the obligations to others in the given stations of life, or the virtues that solid traditions have formed in their adherents. Rather, the modern self aims at “authenticity,” the untrammeled expression of whatever inner definition or inclination the self wants to express. Modern societies are not only to tolerate such expressive [End Page 474] individuals; they are to affirm and embrace them. Criticizing them or their actions amounts to “hate speech.” Trueman devotes the main part of his book to tracing the intellectual pedigree behind the phenomenon of the modern self. Ideas have consequences and the author wants to examine the chain of ideas that have brought us to the current state. In “Foundations of the Revolution” he traces the impact of Rousseau, the Romantic poets, and the really big theorists: Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin. He then moves to the “Sexualization of the Revolution,” in which he surveys the thought and impact of Freud. He concludes that section by conjuring up thinkers of the recent past, whom many of us remember from the 1960s—Marcuse and Reich—who “politicized sex.” Throwing off the sexual restraints of the old Christian bourgeois order would be the first step to revolution. The last major section deals with the triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the “T,” which stands for transgenderism. In the latter section he deals with the incongruities and contradictions of the powerful LGBTQ movement. All sorts of “expressive individualism” do not fit together so easily. In a concluding “Unscientific Prologue,” he reflects on the possible futures of a society so destabilized by rampant individualism, and what it means for the church. This book is a bracing survey of intellectual history and makes a compelling case for understanding the current situation in the light of major thinkers of the past. But there are problems. A major one has to do with the role of ideas in historical change. Are they as important as he makes them out to be? He admits that he is not doing a comprehensive account, but it would have been helpful to have touched on the major economic, social, and political changes that are perhaps just as important as ideas in the unfolding of history. Further, he implies that the emerging notion of the human self is drastically different than Christian views of the self but does not explain how it is different. The lay folks I taught kept asking about the Christian anthropology that is being jettisoned by the triumph of the modern self. The teacher had to supply the answers! Another oddity is that he does not mention Robert Bellah, whose Habits of the Heart (1985, re-issued 2007) made “expressive and utilitarian individualism” part of the intellectual landscape. Indeed, more attention [End Page 475] to the utilitarian version of individualism, as well as to the identity politics, to which extreme individualism inadvertently leads, would have been very helpful. Nevertheless, this formidable work lends great understanding to our current chaos...

Judith A Merkle, (2020) Discipleship, Secularity, and the Modern Self: Dancing to Silent Music

Judith A Merkle, (2020) Discipleship, Secularity, and the Modern Self: Dancing to Silent Music

Awakening from the sleep-walking society: Crisis, detachment and the real in prepper awakening narratives

Thoroughly saturated by ordinary crisis, routinized emergency and the normalization of apocalypticism, late-modern society is nevertheless depicted as sleep-walking into crisis; a further, overlapping crisis of the ‘real.’ This paper explores the potential of prepper awakening narratives – the moment preppers ‘wake up' to the reality of crisis – to contribute to explorations of detachment and denial in the Anthropocene. These narratives, part of the wider repertoire of prepper story-crafting, provide justification for the prepper’s transition to an anticipatory subjectivity, emotionally and sensually attuned to crisis and motivated to prepare. Extending existing conceptualizations of awakening, I argue that prepper awakenings are defined by the uncanny realization of distance from an ideal state of security. To illustrate, I consider narratives of bodily vulnerability, insecurity at home and abandonment in public places, which express shock at the failure of relationality implicit to the safety fictions of these spaces. In this reckoning with the ‘autonomous’ modern self the agential and aware prepper emerges, but this does not in itself lead to a renewed moment of politics or production of revolutionary consciousness. Instead, the horrifying real’ is recrafted as a vital space of self-reliance and resourcefulness, a place to reflect on endurance beyond this world-ending.

The Evasion of Literary History

The Evasion of Literary History

Your Bodies are Our Future: Vietnamese Men’s Engagement with Korean Television Dramas as a Technology of the Self

ABSTRACT In the 21st century Korean television dramas (K-dramas) have featured prominently in the Vietnamese menu of mass cultural consumption as part of Hallyu – the global popularisation of South Korean cultural products. Grounded in Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of the self’, which conceptualises humans’ use of various means to achieve personal ambitions, this article discusses how Vietnamese working-class men use K-dramas in their constructions of self. It explores these informants’ ‘forward-learning’ reception, manifested in how they draw lessons from two prominent themes in K-dramas: the pursuit of dreams and representations of soft masculinities, marked by upper- and middle-class male characters’ metrosexual lifestyles. Through a psychosocial exploration of these informants’ viewing experiences, the article examines how they construct a modern self that fits their desire for a metropolitan lifestyle and upward mobility in light of neoliberalism in modernising Vietnam. The article contributes to Hallyu research, audience research and contemporary Vietnamese studies.