Unity Of Self Research Articles

‘Spiritual Friends’: an investigation of children’s spirituality in the context of British urban secondary education

This article argues relational consciousness of Self and Other is influenced by multiple significant relationships – what are termed ‘Spiritual Friends’. The research on which this article is based explores the spirituality of children within the context of British urban secondary education, and identifies significant relationships in shaping spirituality. The importance of formative and current spiritual relationships is considered through the perspective of practical theology, as well as research seeking to hear the child’s voice, and reflections on spirituality and its expressions. The researcher considers relational consciousness to be the core of spirituality, and reflection on the data is guided by Hay’s categories of Child-Self and Child-Other (including Transcendent) consciousness, and movement towards the Unity of Self and Other. The article claims Spiritual Friends are found in three significant areas: parents and carers, teachers and authority figures, and social (or conventional) friendships. Of these the data show social friendships are the most valuable to the children, and argue technology and social media play an important role in sustaining these relationships. In light of these findings, further investigations are suggested.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la tension et le rythme par Arnaud Tripet

Reviews 239 introduction is undertheorized, subsequent chapters build on Bourdieu’s claim that cultural products emerge, and derive their symbolic value, from particular sociohistorical contexts.Producers of literature include not only authors but also ghostwriters, editors, publishers, book reviewers, and/or literary prize panels—for the impact that the latter have had on reader perception and the novel’s success. In each of the two parts of Steemers’s study, a brief introduction defining the prevailing Zeitgeist is followed by two chapters contrasting a bestseller playing to the reading public’s desire for the exotic and authentic—L’enfant noir for its content and Les soleils des indépendances for its style—with an iconoclastic novel whose anti-colonial rhetoric (Le pauvre Christ de Bomba) or suspect authorship (Le devoir de violence) discomforted readers and discouraged promotion. Authors’ trajectories are seemingly secondary (ample references to Adèle King’s Rereading Camara Laye and Christopher Wise’s biography of Yambo Ouologuem, for example, fill this gap) to the analysis of the publishers’history, ideological leaning and financial objectives. Steemers gives insights into the politics of publishing, revealing for instance that Plon, with its history of supporting the Catholic right and publishing for short-term gains, underwrote L’enfant noir because it promoted the universal values of France’s civilizing mission, while Mongo Beti’s corrosive critique of Catholic colonial missionaries left him the option of a peripheral if Paris-based publisher, Présence Africaine, a fledgling concern in 1956 under the direction of Senegalese writer and politician, Alioune Diop. Steemers’s research into the initial reception by press reviewers and book prize judges and how their relationship to publishing houses with vested interests and their own ideological positions inform their critiques adds to the interest of this rendering of the ‘backstory ’ of mid-century African literature. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Judith E. Preckshot Tripet, Arnaud. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la tension et le rythme. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 987-2-8124-0777-2. Pp. 184. 19 a. Tripet presents an insightful and readable study of characteristic themes that pervade all of Rousseau’s works. He discerns tensions between contrasting but reconcilable principles in Rousseau’s thought. The two Discours describe the loss of innocence and happiness in humanity as societies developed. The Contrat social, on the other hand, seeks to formulate an ideal society where such happiness and virtue can be preserved. While the latter work focuses on the human collectivity, Émile attempts to protect the same values in the individual. In the Confessions and Rêveries, Rousseau speaks about himself as the exemplification of his ideals rather than theorizing in general terms. The unifying principle in all these works is the idea of the loss and regaining of our natural purity and happiness. Rousseau in his own life went through the same stages that humanity as a whole did in its history. The greatest threats to one’s personal integrity are time and other people. The most perfect fulfillment is to be found in a timeless state where one becomes sufficient unto oneself, when one transcends the obstacles represented by the encroachments of temporality and the corrupting influence of others. Such a happiness was known by Rousseau in his childhood, during the years he spent with Madame de Warens, and on the island of Saint-Pierre in the Lac de Bienne. Memory is the binding force that insures the unity of self through the different stages of life. Moreover, it is in the inner self, in one’s individual conscience that a person comes to know God. Another theme explored by Tripet is that of love in Rousseau’s writings. Tripet emphasizes the influence of the death of Rousseau’s mother at the time of his birth on his relationship with women. He was constantly in pursuit of a maternal figure, and his erotic drives often became confused with filial sentiments. He developed a neo-courtly ideal of unconsummated love as the most noble and satisfying form of this experience. The greatest fulfillment lies in the unfulfilled. In his autobiographical writings, Rousseau presents a number of examples, like his Platonic relationship with Sophie d’Houdetot. In La Nouvelle Hélo...

Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler by Benjamin Bennett (review)

Benjamin Bennett, Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism: Its Trail from Baumgarten and Kant to Walt Disney and Hitler. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013. xiii + 285 pp.Hannah Arendt argues that modern totalitarianism, most notably Nazism and Stalinism, arose not out of nationalism but out of millennialism. This is the belief that the absolute perfection of the human condition is achievable by human agency alone and is to be distinguished from a religious millennialism or apocalypse that posits an ultimate divine intervention. By this linkage Arendt tries to explain how people are driven by the of an ideal contrary to reason or experience. For Arendt secular millennialism emerged in the twentieth century. This is the starting point for Benjamin Bennett's provocative new book, in which he argues that the millennial impulse can already be found fully developed in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Aesthetics in this sense is not so much about the practical questions of art but about the experience of the beautiful as an ideal and its political implications. Bennett focuses primarily on the Continental philosophical tradition, which he takes to be representative of the whole; there is little concern for the Anglo-American aesthetic and ethical trail that emerges from David Hume. Aesthetics as Secular Millennialism strikes me as an extended unacknowledged debate with the philosopher Roger Scruton.The aesthetic trail traced by Bennett stretches from Baumgarten and Kant to Schiller, later reemerging with Cassirer and culminating with Heidegger and Adorno. It emerges, in Bennett's view, as a response to Cartesian dualism and the problem of the self. For Schiller and Kant the focus is on how to achieve a particularized and unified self while attempting to explain the possibility of communicability between subjects. They posit an apperception that is both the foundation of individual self-consciousness and the basis of a shared universal experience prior to the particularizing of that self-consciousness. In this we can see a millennialist pursuit of the ideal that transcends the factuality of experience. Bennett finds such beliefs self-contradictory, rejecting as delusional or posturing any claims about either an autonomous aesthetic object or an aesthetic experience. For Bennett, such claims harbor ulterior motives related to a millennial desire to impose certainty on an alienating, chaotic world. Thus, we can see two versions of the millennial in Heidegger's pursuit of authentic immediacy and the unattainable ideality in poetry and in Adorno's desperate retreat from barbarism in his conception of critical negativity.The role of communication closely links aesthetics with hermeneutics and the role of language in shaping our understanding of the world. Indeed, Bennett sees hermeneutics as the modern continuation of eighteenth-century aesthetics, the pursuit of truth by the hermeneutic circle as part of the same millennialist impulse. Here he focuses his analysis on Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer, and Heidegger. Bennett's central argument often dances a delicate logical line between the fallacies of the undistributed middle and the post hoc, repeatedly admitting that those seeking the aesthetic ideal are not necessarily totalitarian, even though both share the millennial. …

‘Strong multiplicity’: an interpretive lens in the analysis of qualitative interview narratives

This article examines the responses to an exercise administered over a 10-year period to graduate-level psychology students in an advanced methodology seminar, to explore one of the central questions of qualitative research: What theories about identity do we bring to our analyses of first-person interview narratives? It suggests that researchers’ interpretations of what appear to be inconsistent and/or conflicting statements by interview subjects about their experience within the course of an interview can serve as a conceptual touchstone reflecting core assumptions about identity. Students’ responses to the exercise, which asked them to interpret two statements by an interview subject that seem to self-contradict, have consistently favored the type of dichotomous analytical paradigms associated with modernist conceptions of a unified self. This trend may be reflective of an insufficiently developed interpretive lexicon within postmodern narrative analysis. The author offers an interpretive approach termed ‘strong multiplicity’ to reflect the possibility of finding legitimate expressions of identity among seemingly inconsistent self-representations.

The self: naturalism, consciousness, and the first-person stance

What is it to occupy a first‐person stance? Is the first‐personal idea one has of oneself in conflict with the idea of oneself as a physical being? How, if there is a conflict, is it to be resolved? In this book a new way to address those questions, drawing inspiration from theories about the self in first millennial India, is formulated. These philosophers do not regard the first‐person stance as in conflict with the natural—their idea of nature not that of scientific naturalism but rather a liberal naturalism non‐exclusive of the normative. A wide range of ideas are explored: reflexive self‐representation, mental files, and quasi‐subject analyses of subjective consciousness; the theory of emergence as transformation; embodiment and the idea of a bodily self; the centrality of the emotions to the unity of self. Buddhism's claim that there is no self too readily assumes an account of what a self must be. This book argues instead that the self is a negotiation between self‐presentation and normative avowal, a transaction grounded in unconscious mind. Immersion, participation, and coordination are jointly constitutive of self, the first‐person stance at once lived, engaged, and underwritten. And all is in harmony with the idea of the natural.

Methodology and mental illness: resistance and restorying

Concerns with social justice have been traditionally associated with a modernist concept of the individual whose actions express an underlying, essential and unified self. This paper compares the usefulness of two methodologies (post-structuralist and narrative) that are based on a rejection of identity of a unified self and compares their usefulness in relation to the development of a social justice paradigm within mental health. It considers how professional forms of knowledge may be deconstructed by post-structural analyses, arguing that these have also been used by service users to articulate more enabling discursive alternatives. The notion of agency is central to our understanding of social justice. We question the commonly held assumption that although post-structuralism deconstructs power and challenges its legitimacy, it is nevertheless unsuited to facilitating the necessary agency to put forward viable alternatives. The second half of the paper considers how narrative research offers greater emancipatory potential by enabling the research subject to author their stories and thereby brings about their own subjective transformation. Nevertheless, the interpretation of people's stories by researchers may result in the imposition of narrative templates that erase complexities and contribute to the perpetuation of oppression. This raises ethical implications in relation to how people's stories are interpreted.

Kant’s One Self and the Appearance/Thing-in-itself Distinction

Kant’s transcendental idealism hinges on a distinction between appearances and things in themselves. The debate about how to understand this distinction has largely ignored the way that Kant applies this distinction to the self. I argue that this is a mistake, and that Kant’s acceptance of a single, unified self in both his theoretical and practical philosophy causes serious problems for the ‘two-world’ interpretation of his idealism.

Behavioral architecture of the cortical sheet

Summary The effortless ability of vertebrates to explore and exploit their environment is strongly correlated with the evolution of the most anterior part of their nervous system, the forebrain, where data from autonomic (visceral), limbic (emotive), and internal and peripheral sensors of the external world are combined to develop, decide, and deploy advantageous behaviors. The correlation of behavioral performance with forebrain expansion suggests that evolution has discovered the developmental means of building vertebrate brains to produce a scalable, special-purpose architecture for efficiently processing and expressing behavior. In mammals, the exuberant expansion of this forebrain is dominated by the growth of their cortex — the two-dimensional sheet that is the major source of their intelligent behavior, especially for primates.

P247 Impact of Implementing COPD Self Management Plans & Rescue Medications Across 3 Hospitals

IntroductionCOPD is the second leading cause of emergency admissions in the UK. National guidelines for managing COPD advise that patients at risk of having or those who have had an...

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse’s Hand

After the death of the author, what remains? For Roland Barthes, who pronounced him dead in 1968, there was a hand: the faceless, voiceless hand of the anonymous scripteur. This hand performs the task of burying the author and then, detachee de toute voix, portee par un pur geste d'inscription (et non d'expression), trace un champ origine. (1) Like the hands from the Encyclopedie plates (also analyzed by Barthes), the hand of the scripteur is not connected to any particular body, to any voice or mind. (2) It does not come from anywhere, is not preceded by anything, but simply comes into being through the act of inscribing a text. What would Denis Diderot have thought about this hand? And how useful is Barthes's essay La Mort de l'auteur today for thinking about authorship in eighteenth-century France? If we accept Barthes's historical framework (as thin as it may be), the eighteenth century belongs to a period marked by the prestige of the individual and the reign of the Auteur-Dieu. This period (from the close of the Middle Ages to the poetry of Stephane Mallarme) was a product of English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation. (3) It ended with Mallarme, who, sans doute le premier, a vu et prevu dans toute son ampleur la necessite de substituer le langage lui-meme a celui qui jusque-la etait cense en etre le proprietaire; pour lui, comme pour nous, c'est le langage qui parle, ce n'est pas l'auteur. (4) What Mallarme freed us from, according to Barthes, was the illusion that authors possess their words. But as Michel Foucault pointed out the following year in Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?, those critics who heralded the death of the author had perhaps not fully measured the consequences of his disappearance. For they continued to rely on the equally problematic category of the work, failing to grasp that the logic of this category disintegrates once we have done away with the author. (5) Indeed, the lingering hand in Barthes's essay seemed to symbolize the difficulty of banishing all vestiges of the author from our understanding of literature. Language cannot quite seem to write itself, for it still needs a hand, however disconnected from any particular body that hand may be. For Diderot, too, writing Le Reve de d'Alembert two centuries before Barthes's essay, there was a hand. This was not the hand of the anonymous scripteur but the hand of a living, breathing, desiring woman: Mlle de Lespinasse. She certainly does not think of herself as an isolated hand (even if she and the doctor Bordeu fancifully imagine people evolving into isolated heads because of excessive intellectual activity, along with other more risque scenarios along the same lines). On the contrary, if there is one thing she is convinced of, it is the unity of her self. To Bordeu, who asks which philosophical questions seem to her in need of no further examination, she answers confidently: Celle de mon unite, de mon moi, par exemple. Pardi, il me semble qu'il ne faut pas tant verbiager pour savoir que je suis moi, que j'ai toujours ete moi, et que je ne serai jamais une autre. (6) And when further asked to account for how isolated molecules can come to constitute a unified self, she answers that mere contact suffices, taking the example of her hand resting on her thigh to illustrate her point: Lorsque je pose ma main sur ma cuisse, je sens bien d'abord que ma main n'est pas ma cuisse, mais quelque temps apres, lorsque la chaleur est egale dans l'une et l'autre, je ne les distingue plus. Les limites de deux parties se confondent, et elles n'en font plus qu'une (100). Although this argument is quickly refuted by Bordeu--a single pinprick and she will realize her hand is separate from her thigh--it is more important philosophically than it might initially appear. For it begs the question--crucial to the dialogue as a whole--of how the contact (sexual or otherwise) between the various interlocutors in Le Reve de d'Alembert affects the unity of their selves. …

What Not to Wear: Exposing the G(host) in Art Education

Two films, Ghost World and Art School Confidential, serve as backdrops for an examination of art education, revealing identity conflicts among artist, student, and teacher. This article addresses ideas of uniqueness, uniformity, professionalism, and nakedness through the concept of personal dress. This critical discussion explores the influence of society on the Lacanian identity in terms of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real registers. Clothing expresses personal identity while providing a mask for the lack of a unified self. In exposing dynamics between conflicting identities, the phantom reality of self and the possibility of self-questioning to artists/educators, this article suggests a repressive ghost in the academic host and a suppressive ghost in the host-self.

James's Answer to Hume: The Empirical Basis of the Unified Self

In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume famously retracts his account of personal identity by confessing that it involves a profound problem he cannot solve, which I have elsewhere identified and called the Bundling Problem. Neither of the two possible solutions that Hume himself considers in the Appendix is a viable option for him by his own lights, which might suggest that any successful account of a unified self must go beyond the empirical framework. In this paper, I argue that we can find a strictly empiricist solution to Hume's problem in William James. I attempt to show that James's descriptions of our experience are phenomenologically more detailed and faithful to how experience is undergone from the first-person perspective, which allows him to explain our belief in an identical, unified self solely on empirical grounds. James finds unity and continuity right in the content of the stream of experience itself. A detailed investigation of James's accounts reveals that Hume's fundamental problem does not stem merely from his lack of empirical resources but, more importantly, from his tacit abandonment of the professed empiricist methodology.

Between Homo Sociologicus and Homo Biologicus: The Reflexive Self in the Age of Social Neuroscience

The social sciences rely on assumptions of a unified self for their explanatory logics. Recent work in the new multidisciplinary field of social neuroscience challenges precisely this unproblematic character of the subjective self as basic, well-defined entity. If disciplinary self-insulation is deemed unacceptable, the philosophical challenge arises of systematically bringing together neurological, psychological, sociological, and anthropological dimensions of analysis in one framework such as dynamic systems theory; and of finding bridging concepts such as memory, social cognition, and cultural scripts that can facilitate the cross disciplinary study of the reflexive self. Relying on the systemic philosophy of science developed by Mario Bunge, this paper takes some steps in this direction.

The Specter of Tokkie—Facing the Past, Inventing the Future: Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Zoë Wicomb ́s novel Playing in the Light, published in 2006, is set in Cape Town in the 1990s at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Its protagonist Marion Campbell, who is the owner of a successful travel agency, is suddenly haunted by the specter of a young woman she does not know, but who seems familiar nevertheless, on the ocean between her flat and Robben Island—where political prisoners were kept—and who seems to strangle her in the muslin curtains of her four-poster bed at night. This face becomes confused with the repressed memory of the family servant of Marion ́s childhood, Tokkie. When Marion sees the young woman’s face again on the title page of a daily newspaper, she discovers that the woman of her nightmares, Patricia Williams, was an activist in the anti-apartheid struggle who was tortured by the police and has just told her story before the TRC. Yet the conflated specters of Tokkie and Patricia Williams set off a process whereby Marion has to confront her own repressed past as a “play white,” i.e., someone who—although of colored origin—was light-skinned enough to pass for white. Marion has to disentangle the web of lies that her biography was until now and find a standpoint from which to invent a future for herself that will be free of the shame which the fear of her colored status becoming public imposed on her. Using Derrida ́s Specters of Marx as a theoretical framework, this paper explores how the past is imbricated in the present and how—only by facing it—is the fiction of a fixed, unified self broken up, making room for inventions of the future. This is the emancipation from racial classification which the New South Africa made possible through the TRC.

The Specter of Tokkie—Facing the Past, Inventing the Future: Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Zoe Wicomb s novel Playing in the Light, published in 2006, is set in Cape Town in the 1990s at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Its protagonist Marion Campbell, who is the owner of a successful travel agency, is suddenly haunted by the specter of a young woman she does not know, but who seems familiar nevertheless, on the ocean between her flat and Robben Island—where political prisoners were kept—and who seems to strangle her in the muslin curtains of her four-poster bed at night. This face becomes confused with the repressed memory of the family servant of Marion s childhood, Tokkie. When Marion sees the young woman’s face again on the title page of a daily newspaper, she discovers that the woman of her nightmares, Patricia Williams, was an activist in the anti-apartheid struggle who was tortured by the police and has just told her story before the TRC. Yet the conflated specters of Tokkie and Patricia Williams set off a process whereby Marion has to confront her own repressed past as a “play white,” i.e., someone who—although of colored origin—was light-skinned enough to pass for white. Marion has to disentangle the web of lies that her biography was until now and find a standpoint from which to invent a future for herself that will be free of the shame which the fear of her colored status becoming public imposed on her. Using Derrida s Specters of Marx as a theoretical framework, this paper explores how the past is imbricated in the present and how—only by facing it—is the fiction of a fixed, unified self broken up, making room for inventions of the future. This is the emancipation from racial classification which the New South Africa made possible through the TRC.

Virtuous selves in vicious times

In this paper I review some of the key elements of Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of narrative identity. I focus on his notions of tradition and unified self, which have been interpreted by some critics as signs of a political conservatism and elitism. My argument proceeds by reviewing the critiques offered by Galen Strawson and Hilde Lindemann Nelson, both concerned with the conflict between tradition and choice. While Strawson and Nelson believe that traditions are oppressive at least to some individuals, MacIntyre offers a more complex understanding of tradition, emphasizing that traditions embody conflicts. In proposing a different reading of these concepts, one I claim is more accurate, I suggest that MacIntyre’s concept of narrative selfhood can serve as foundation of a political theory that is utopian in a standard liberal way.

European identity: between modernity and postmodernity

The purpose of this inquiry is to rethink the concept of European identity within the framework of the Declaration on European Identity and the Charter of European Identity. It will be argued that those documents employ the modernist notion of a centered, rational, stable, autonomous and unified self. However, this idea of the self leads to exclusion and essentialism. In this way, European identity cannot embrace the multiculturalism of European societies. Thus, it should be replaced by a more flexible, dynamic and shifting concept of identity.

¿Quién es Cressida? Fidelidad y drama en la identidad personal

Starting off of a passage of a work of Shakespeare, the roll of fidelity in the configuration of the personal identity will be reviewed. The article is centered in tow main tendencies in the conception of the same one, taken root in the narrative understanding of the self: the fidelity like permanence opposite to change and the fidelity like opening and advance towards what makes be, gives unity and make sense. But the self is discovered in both cases divided, needed to narrate for being, fighting with time, that can appears like threat as well as obstacle to be only one and a different one. The alternative that sets out here lies in a fidelity like return to the essential, where the being and the unity of self remain, whereas he open himself to the newness of that fundamental. This opening consist basically in a dialogue, in which the self receives and gives his own, playing its being in the dramatic space, thus actualizing every time the self, its unity and its sense.

To be or not to be: The self as illusion

Moderated by Krista Tippett, creator and host of America Public Media's On Being, philosophers Thomas Metzinger (University of Mainz, Germany) and Evan Thompson (University of Toronto) join cardiologist and expert on near-death experiences Pim van Lommel (Hospital Rijnstate, the Netherlands) to examine recent developments in neuroscience and philosophy that shed light on whether our conscious experience of a unified self is reality or illusion. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred December 7, 2010, 6:00-7:30 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City.

Locating the self: narratives and practices of authenticity in French clown training

This paper explores clown pedagogy in relation to authenticity, taking as its starting point the clown workshop at the École Philippe Gaulier in June 2008 in which the author was a participant-researcher. It explores how and where an analysis of French clown training both reveals reinscription of authenticity – the idea that the ‘true self’ is revealed through the mask form of clown – and exposes fissures in these ideas. Within this training, a construct of the authentic self exists alongside techniques that disrupt conventional notions of stable, linear identity by utilising techniques of disorientation to shift the locus of the self from the core of the body to a negotiable space between performer and spectator. Examining the ways in which gestural style was both linked with and contested the idea of authenticity within the French mime tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the article examines how such conflicting ideas of authenticity continue to circulate within the contemporary clown classroom. Specifically, it looks at how the pedagogical language used by Gaulier and the descriptive language of students, as well as embodied classroom practices, discursively reinscribe the idea of a stable, unified self while simultaneously disrupting it. By juxtaposing anddrawing connections between an older mime tradition and a current pedagogical practice, the ways in which the idea of the ‘self’ has been and continues to be contested, altered and redefined within a specific site of performer training are highlighted.