Notion Of Self Research Articles

The fantasy of control: Behaviourist transgressions of neoliberal subjectivity

Neoliberal governance of individuals has largely been based on a specific notion of self and society, emphasising human capital, authenticity and essentialism. I argue that this comprises an essentially humanist view of the self. However, within contemporary society, remnants of the mechanistic conception of man continue to surface in politics and workplace management. By examining strands of humanism and behaviourism within political and economic modes of governance, I trace how images outside of neoliberal discourse can take on a transgressive ideological function. I propose that, rather than challenging neoliberalism, such apparent transgression strengthens it.

Carl Rogers’ Notion of “Self-actualization” in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Loss of identity, alienation, and self-actualization, along with the split in self, are important ideas of literary works belonging to the first half of the twentieth century. Carl Rogers has pointed out to the split between the real and ideal self. He describes self-actualization as a fluid process and the self as an essential part of one’s personality that determines how one relates to the world. Rogers believes that the real self is a self-concept that a person might experience, whereas the ideal self is the one that person would like to achieve. This article analyzes the personality of the protagonist of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, using Carl Rogers' notion of self and self-actualization, with particular reference to the incongruency of the real and ideal self. Roger's notion of the self, has not yet been applied on Joyce's works in the previous studies, and so is highlighted here in relation to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Keywords: self-actualization; real self; ideal self; alienation; personality

Caring as sharing. Negotiating the moral boundaries of receiving care

ABSTRACT Informal caregiving is increasingly considered a health care delivery-resource within the North European welfare states. While ‘informal’ often refers to non-professional, ‘caregiving’ connotes both affective concern (caring about) and practical action (caring for). This duality of meanings, however, often refers to the one direction in which care is given. Care, we suggest, is relational and also requires that people receiving care are able to or wanting to share their needs. Informal caregiving thus requires sharing. Based on 155 semi-structured, narrative interviews with people with lung or bowel cancer, living in Denmark, Sweden or England, this paper explores how and with whom people ‘share’ when they fall ill. We approach sharing as a heuristic for reflecting on informal-caregiving, and illustrate how being cared for or asking for care are entangled with the management of social risks and notions of selfhood. We conclude that informal caregiving should explicitly be recognised as morally and sympathetically committed practices, which attend to the diversity of local moral worlds of patients, their needs and experiences.

Del yo narrativo a la identidad personal: problemas y riesgos de la auto-comprensión humana

Personal identity is one of the major philosophical problems in Western late modernity. Most proposed approaches to the subject share a particular feature: the importance given to the notion of self. In this paper we will address the relation between self and person from the point of view of the hypothesis of a narrative identity. We first study some key points of the historical framework of the discussion, and then we analyze problems and risks arising from one and the same category mistake: failing to distinguish between deictic self, performative self and constative self.

Is Bildung possible in the classroom?: Autobiographical writing as philosophical exercise (askēsis) for developing one’s Bildung

The development of self is an important part of formal education, and related to the notion of self is the development of Bildung, or cultivation of the self. Bildung has been an integral part of curriculum theory in the United States. However, despite many theoretical debates on Bildung in the literature, there seems to be a lack of the pragmatic use of Bildung at the classroom level. Hence, the purpose of this article is to explore how classroom teachers or teacher educators can foster and nourish their students’ Bildung at the classroom level. This study examines the Bildung processes of two doctoral students based on their autobiographical essays to show their effort of developing themselves. Foucault’s notion of askēsis has been used as a theoretical framework, which is a philosophical exercise that includes three forms of reflexivity: Memory, Meditation and Method. Based on the findings, we make the following implications for curriculum studies and teacher education: 1) Bildung needs to be guided, nourished, and fostered through formal education by teachers in the classroom, which then becomes a “habitat,” an environment in which both teachers and students dwell as Bildung-centered teachers and students, 2) Bildung needs to be practiced as askēsis by students and teachers as an act of care through classroom activities, 3) Bildung-centered teachers do have autonomy, agency, and independence to create such activities for their students, in which the process of Bildung can be carried out.

Immersive narratives of ‘self-work’ in an experience society: understanding the cruise ship experience

ABSTRACTCommentators have long argued that cruise ship tourism is a highly rationalised form of mass consumption, a ‘total institution’ in which consumption defines and controls the individual’s experience. Arguing that this represents a simplification, this article suggests that a closer analysis of cruise tourism tells us something profound about the nature of what it means to be a consumer in a de-territorialised age. Specifically, the article explores the suggestion that the cruise experience represents a mode of consumption in which the consumer effectively becomes the product. Through the deployment of an autoethnographic investigation of the cruising experience the paper seeks to shed light on the relationship between the tourist experience and notions of self, while making a case for a re-conceptualisation of consumption as self-work. In this light, the contention is made that the ideological power of consumption is intensified by tourism’s emphasis on the experience of the consumer as part of a broader process in which there has been a shift away from the specific consumption of products towards consumption as a temporal-partial process of self-endowment.

Two Ancient Chinese Antinomies: The Hengxian and Early Cosmology

The cosmology elaborated in the Hengxian is eclectic. Its most salient point is the notion of self–generation which most probably stems from some other independent source no longer extant today. Apart from the cosmology of self–generation, there existed three other types of cosmology in ancient China: ‘nonpresence to presence’ cosmology, numerological cosmology, and mythological cosmology. Interestingly, the pursuit of the cosmological problematic led ancient Chinese thought to two antinomies. The first one revolved around the issue of whether the world and the myriad things have a beginning. The latter antinomy regarded the question of whether the generation and transformation of the world and the myriad things is caused by ‘some agency’ or whether there is ‘no maker’ involved in the cosmological process. These two antinomies have their close counterparts in two of the four antinomies introduced by Immanuel Kant, which attests to the depth of philosophical reasoning in ancient China.

Fenomenologia innego. Paul Ricœur i Emmanuel Lévinas wobec ontologii całości

Artykuł ten jest próbą krytycznego omówienia sporu Ricœura z Lévinasem dotyczącego rozumienia etyki, ściśle rzecz biorąc koncepcji „podmiotu” etycznego. Wychodząc od przeprowadzonej przez obu filozofów krytyki nowożytnej absolutyzacji cogito, poddaję analizie rozwijane przez Ricœura dialektyczne ujęcie podmiotu (fr. soi) wyrażonego w formule „ten-który-jest-sobą-samym-jak-i-innym” oraz opisany przez Lévinasa fenomen „radykalnej inności”. Następnie staram się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy możliwe jest intelektualne porozumienie między Ricœurem i Lévinasem, polegające na wyznaczeniu wspólnego horyzontu dla koncepcji podmiotu otwartej dialektyki i podmiotu ukonstytuowanego przez źródłowe „wyznaczenie” do odpowiedzialności, w granicach którego można mówić o fenomenologii siebie, tj. fenomenologii podmiotu, który rozpoznaje się dzięki innemu niż on sam.

The metaphysical self and the self in metaphysics and religion: Ambiguities of mind and reality

The thesis of this article is that the self is a construct or illusion and simultaneously real. The notion of self is constitutive in metaphysics and operates subconsciously and indirectly in all human activities. The metaphysical self constitutes its own reality. The article is critical of developments in cognitive science and neuroscience where neurocentrism reduces self to brain processes. The tenet is that the self is more than its biological make-up and the measurement of brain processes. The metaphysical as well as illusory aspects of self are discussed. Some important aspects of self that are visited include the construction of the self, its bodylines, contextuality, intentionality and unity. The nature of human intuition as grounded in our evolutionary make-up is proposed as a basis for the unity of the self. The role of the self in religion is briefly dealt with, focusing on the link between the notion of self and the concept of God.

Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Husserlian Analysis of Person

ABSTRACTThe distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship between minimal self and narrative self requires further clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by outlining how person is related to its environment, to other people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership and narrative self based on authorship.

Interrogating the Notion of Self, ‘Mind’ and Personhood in Tangkhul Naga Tradition

The article attempts to examine the conceptual foundation of the self, mind and personhood in the traditional thoughts of the Tangkhul Nagas and the social implications and cultural models that shaped these conceptualisations. Partly constrained by the scarcity of written accounts, I have closely looked at the language usage, etymology of words and cultural practices of the community. Ning (‘mind’) is the central concept. Rich embodied expressions associate thoughts and emotions with certain internal organs of human body. The soul resides in the liver, luck in the brain and feelings in the heart. Ning is said to be acquired. This raises the question of whether the acquisition of ‘mind’ strictly refers to an acquisition of the mental faculty or does it include social norms and other skills. Drawing from the philosophy of Mead, the central argument is that the self, mind and ‘significant symbols’ conflated in the idea of personhood.

Modelling Human Capital for Sustenance of Whole – Judicious Outlook

Growing necessities for human sustenance remain always the matter of top priority of human thought process since the existence of human civilisation for its betterment. Notion of self and social betterment compelled the individuals and components of societies to make investment in kind and capital to forms the human capital for cultivating the capabilities essential for better sustenance. As human civilization travelled from ancient to modern era, it has got mind boggling transformation with the use of human capital. But when it measure on the ground of sustenance of whole, investment in human capital formation and the way it has been used for betterment, not portray sufficiency in itself. The reason been for this insufficiency is that, political systems or ruling power of respective nation subordinated the promotion of formation of human capital and used it somehow exclusively for their betterment only. On the contrary individual also deprived of imbibing human capital in them or by parent in their offspring’s as they were kept aloof from resources needed for infusing capabilities. This paper thus is the effort to propose the new line of thinking for investment in human capital, rational utilization and formation of capabilities and expand the horizon of investment and formation human capital from skill and knowledge to social endosmosis, Global Common Public Religious Code, Uniform Righteous Primary Education Accords, International Funds for Resources Utilization, Worldwide Opportunity Protecting Accords.

Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction ed. by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak

Reviewed by: Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction ed. by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak Alexandra Effe (bio) Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, editors Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, vi + 298 pp. ISBN 978-3319554136, $119.99 hardcover. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak's edited collection Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction explores texts that contest, highlight, or blur the distinction between the modes of fiction and auto/biography, in so doing departing from traditional genre conventions and conceptions of subjectivity, identity (both personal and collective), and truth. The book brings together lifewriting scholars and practicing biographers, who engage with innovative lifewriting texts from the UK, Italy, Austria, and Spain. The aim of the collection is to trace how writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have extended the parameters of auto/biography. [End Page 381] The introduction offers a theoretical foundation by sketching how the distinction between factual and fictional narration has been conceptualized in auto/biography theory and narratology. Julia Novak draws attention to the fact that experimental life writing frequently challenges distinctions between factual and fictional narration, and genre categories based on such a division. Novak also helpfully describes the different levels on which experiments in life writing take place: the subject of auto/biography (experiments with who or what is the focus of the auto/ biographical account); generic composites (combination of auto/biographical and fictional material, merging, for instance, auto/biography and classical tragedy or magic realism); style (experimental use of syntax or tense, for instance); structure (nonlinear narration, multiple perspectives, frame narratives); intertextuality and metalepsis (crossings between real world and fictional world or between the auto/ biographical text and an author's other works); play with names and pronouns (challenges to conceptions of wholeness and unity of identity, subverting the autobiographical pact as defined by Philippe Lejeune); and media (multimodal narratives or experiments in terms of layout and typography). The book is organized into four sections. The first part, "(Dis)Solving the Self: Methods and Modes," includes three essays that offer insights into narratives constituting or inspired by the respective authors' personal memories, but complicated through experimental narrative strategies. Max Saunders discusses Ford Maddox Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance as an example of "postmodernism within modernism" (53), Andy Wimbush analyzes B. S. Johnson's Trawl as indebted to Samuel Beckett, and Eveline Kilian gives an account of Christine Brooke-Rose's autobiographical works Remake and Life, End of in relation to her fiction and the nouveau roman. The second section, entitled "Genre B(l)ending: Self, Family, and the Nation," describes a selection of auto/biographical narratives experimental in their treatment of identity as collective and relational. The section begins with Pietra Palazzolo's analysis of Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road and Fiere, in which we find a layered, relational, and dialogic notion of self. Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir reads Jordi Soler's trilogy La guerra perdida as an account of the author's personal and family history, as an exploration of cultural and national identity, and as an account of the Spanish Civil War. In the third chapter in this section, Vanessa Hannesschläger situates Austrian author Peter Handke's stage text Storm Still (Immer noch Sturm) in the context of Carinthian Slovene resistance during World War II. She describes how Handke uses biographies of members of his own family and fictionalizes them in ascribing to them experiences of resistance fighters, thus creating a text at the boundaries of biography, historiography, and fiction. The collection then turns to texts innovative in their use of different media. The chapters in the third section—"Intermedial Experiments in Life-Writing"—explore texts that draw on photography and film. Antonio Lunardi elucidates how photography is integrated into Lalla Romano's Romanzo di figure by focusing on the relation between image and text in different editions from 1975, 1986, and 1997. María Alhambra Díaz gives an account of filmic references to The Three Caballeros in Dark Back of Time (Negra espalda del tiempo) by Javier Marías. She shows that the [End Page 382] author's experiments with mediality...

“The gerontology of suffering and its social remediation: a Buddhist perspective”

ABSTRACTWhile suffering is often assumed to be an intractable aspect of growing old, gerontological work on older adults’ experiences of suffering remains limited, and there is a stated need for more conceptual clarity on the construct of suffering. Buddhism provides a unique religious and philosophical perspective to understanding suffering’s complex relations to physical and emotional pain, the inevitability of change, and to notions of self. This paper explores current gerontological research on suffering and analyzes how Buddhism may offer new insights and techniques into understanding the experience of suffering in later life and, most importantly, the social response it calls forth.

Soi et soi/être, de la bactérie au salience network

ObjectivesThe notion of self remains difficult to define. The objective of the present paper is to try to more fully understand what the self is, by tracing its evolution from the origins, and by focusing on the distinction between self and non-self, the guiding idea being that the self/non-self distinction is a primary and fundamental constant in the construction of organisms. MethodsWe rapidly describe the evolution of the self/non-self distinction, from bacteria to humans, in the two main systems where the self is essential, namely the immune system and the brain. ResultsThe organization of the immune self is still poorly understood. It seems that the self needs to be considered on two levels, that of memory storage and that of memory supervision. In the brain, we also need to distinguish a preconscious self from an acting self that can be called the self-being. To illustrate the notion de self-being, we analyze what it could be in the case of the compulsion to dink in alcoholics. DiscussionIt seems that the self builds itself using sensory mechanisms that convert non-self into self, and executive mechanisms that exclude the non-self. The conversion of the non-self into self builds a system of representations of non-self that prepares the subject to confront the environment; the executive mechanisms rest on the ability to make choices, on a “this is me, that is not me” model; in the brain, this could be achieved by an executive process using the self-being, which is the moment when an object is chosen occupies the whole space of the acting self; it is suggested that the biological underpinning of this enacted choice – the self-being – is the salience network. ConclusionThe study of the evolution of the self from the origins, focusing on the self/non-self distinction, could be a useful tool to more fully understand the nature of the self.

Constructing the Aesthetic Self of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa

The Bhāgavata Purāṇa combines Vedāntin philosophy, dramatic and aesthetic elements, and personal expressions in a unique manner. Moreover, it seems to be conveying a notion of selfhood or personhood which is unique and innovative for the Hindu tradition. This paper aims at uncovering this unique notion. It deconstructs the BhP by arguing for the amalgamation of the Rasa-aesthetic school with Vedānta. It then turns to the topic of personhood in the Hindu tradition; it raises the complexity of discussing personhood in the Indian context and discusses three notions of personhood which are ‘the Worldly Self of Mīmāṁsā’, the ‘Solitary Self of Sāṅkhya’, and the ‘Transcendental Self of Vedānta’. Having articulated these three notions, it highlights the notion of aesthetic personhood underlying the BhP. The paper goes further to differentiate notions of Vivarta from those of Pariṇāma, pointing out at the Pariṇāma worldview to be underlying the notion of aesthetic personhood of the BhP. At last and as an outcome of its main argument, it offers a sketch of ascending notions of aesthetic notions of personhood in the BhP.

The long and winding road: Experiences of students entering university through transition programs

This article presents outcomes of two studies which focus on the lived experience of transition by students entering higher education in NSW (New South Wales), Australia, from two divergent pathways: Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and a university based enabling program. The studies intersect in two fundamental ways. First, the theoretical foundations (Mezirow’s Transformational Learning Theory and Bourdieu’s Social Capital Theory) which emphasise the role of habits of mind and the habitus respectively in an individual’s life. Second, both studies have identified the primacy of the contribution of education to changing notions of self. The studies have found that successful students reappraise and reimagine their self-identity inclusive of possible future selves. The studies reject deterministic and often deficit models of socio-cultural influences on self-concept, and instead embrace the perspective that adult learning can not only realise, but also build upon latent capabilities, and ultimately that it is an empowering experience for many transitioning students.

Intimate Visualities: Intimacy as Social Critique and Radical Possibility in Kyle Abraham and Carrie Schneider's Dance Response Project's I am Sold and Blood on the Leaves

Choreographer and dancer Kyle Abraham and photographer and filmmaker Carrie Schneider position intimacy in screen dance as an affective hailing to viewers. The intimate visualities they achieve serve as an opportunity to critically hypothesize ways of being in community and understanding black visual relationships to subjectivity. In both explorations of meaning a production of close relationships to others, to notions of selfhood, and to blackness animate a radical love of others and of self. Their collaborations, the Dance Response Project, subtly, but powerfully tap persistent modes of black being and of theorizing the social new to creative discourse.

Show me what threatens you, and I can tell who you are: Perception of threat and the self

This article proposes a methodical way to understand the self from the angle of psychologically meaningful threat. On the basis of systematic cross-cultural examination of threats to core self-motives, this comprises the notion of self as being most reliably described by instances in which a person shows a motivated response to information from the social environment. Building on accounts of cultural differences in self- construal, this approach allows insight into self-related processes, because motivated responses to self-threat should depend on how the self is defined in the social space. The research conducted from this approach has examined cultural differences to threats to freedom, belonging and consistency. For people with a collectivistic cultural background, as well as for those with a more interdependent self-construal within a given culture, responses to freedom, belonging and consistency threats were less intense, particularly when threats were directed at the individual sense of self. Looking at the self from this perspective further allows for insight into underlying mechanisms into self-related processes, as well as for more direct information on the influence of context on what constitutes the self.

Emotion and consumption: Toward a new understanding of cultural collisions between Hong Kong and PRC luxury consumers

Incorporating Illouz’s theory of emotions, this study examines how specific emotions drive consumption, as embodied by escalating conflicts between Hong Kong and the PRC luxury consumers. When affluent Mainlanders pursue status signifiers via consumption of relatively affordable luxury goods in Hong Kong, local residents’ disdain triggers a nexus of emotions: envy, resentment, and status anxiety, linked to fears of being occupied by and assimilated into Chinese culture. Deploying cultural capital and status competition rooted in imagination and refinement, Hong Kongese contrast their knowledge-based use of luxury brands with the avid consumption of PRC visitors, fueled by often extreme wealth. For Hong Kongese, such one-upmanship degenerates into self-doubt and self-failure in their image management attempts, precipitating intense hostility toward PRC consumers. Emotions engender colliding notions of self, status, and cultural and political identity between these disparate yet intertwined cultures.