Henry Dumas's Poetry of a Natural Man

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Michael Castro
Keyword(s):  
Natural Man

The Russian People as They Are. Turgenev’s View

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-82
Author(s):  
Sergey Nickolsky
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Philosophical Nature

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not fully considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov (the theme of the mind and heart), L. Tolstoy (the theme of the living and the dead, nature and society, the people and the lords), F. Dostoevsky (natural and rational rights), A. Chekhov (worthy and vulgar life). This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others.

Idiocy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph N. Straus
Keyword(s):  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Holy Fool ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The Village ◽  
Music Representations ◽  
Deep Interest

Idiocy, once understood as a mark of divine disfavor, is later medicalized under a variety of seemingly scientific classifications, culminating in a eugenic-era fear of the “menace of the feebleminded” and the widespread institutionalization to which it gave rise. In literature and in music, representations of idiocy have generally fallen into a small number of types: the Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot; the Wild Child and the Natural Man; the Village Idiot (often played for laughs); and the Eugenic Idiot (simultaneously pitiable and a feared source of violence, possibly sexual in nature). Modernist music represents idiocy in its tendency toward simplification in all domains; its static, nondevelopmental character; its deliberate cultivation of disfluency and inarticulateness; its interest in generic incongruity; its pleasure in low humor; and above all its deep interest in the childlike, the folk, and the primitive (including the racial primitive). As in modernist literature, musical representations of idiocy enable the sorts of compositional innovations that are widely understood as defining musical modernism.

The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Important Sense

This chapter examines the similarities and divergences between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau with regard to their account of human nature. It begins with a discussion of Hobbes's science of human nature, which is part of his science of nature in general. Hobbes's psychology is in principle reducible to physiology, and ultimately to physics. Self-maintenance is the major imperative facing the Hobbesian man. The chapter then considers Rousseau's claims, which he articulated in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, that men without society must be mere isolated animals. For Rousseau, natural man is not the noble savage, nor is he Hobbes's rational egoist. Both these conditions are social conditions and, in an important sense, nonnatural. There is a good deal of straightforward Hobbes-like utilitarianism in the Social Contract.

Federal versus Natural Man

2018 ◽  
pp. 140-159
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Elazar
Keyword(s):  
Natural Man
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