scholarly journals Integral gnosis and the material other

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Eero Karhu
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Integral Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Social Perspective ◽  
Material World ◽  
Strong Potential ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Cultural Agency

In this article, I look at Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory as mimesis. This invites me to look at Integral Theory in three ways. First, I look at Integral Theory as process of making materialistic alterity, thus maintaining and fortifying the spirituality of the self. Second, I look at it from the perspective of the dialectics of epistemologies of estrangement and intimacy, raising questions concerning the legitimacy of the juxtaposing interpretative and explanatory approaches to culture. Third, I look at it from a social perspective, as a powerful instance of modern mimesis that creates a typically modern history. I will show how Integral Theory is grounded in the modern intuition of agency being distinct from and superior to the outer material world. To the extent that cultural agency has to materialize in some form, so does Integral Theory. My aim is to recall the close relations of scientific discourse with spirituality, even with magic and even more importantly, I want to show how supposedly secular intuitions of identity and agency bear strong potential for spiritual and religious discourse. 

MODERNITY AND THE SELF IN THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1211-1227 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. G. COCKS
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gender Patterns ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

Recent work in the modern history of sexuality, now an established field of inquiry, is characterized by particular approaches to the interpretation of modernity and selfhood. In general, and in contrast to previous approaches, the books under review treat modernity as a localized process with specific effects. Sexual identity is understood in a similar way, as a phenomenon bounded by locality, class, age, nationality, gender, patterns of sociability, and other contextual factors. As such, speaking of sexual identity as a unitary entity, or as something that has historically been structured by an opposition of homosexual/heterosexual, no longer makes sense. In fact, the homo/hetero binary is of much more recent vintage than has been hitherto thought. These histories of sexuality challenge historians of all kinds to rethink the nature of categories like selfhood, identity, and modernity.

The Brokenness of Caesar's Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-251
Author(s):  
Sharon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Material World ◽  
Christian Conversion ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Structures

Caesar's Things is a semi-autobiographical novel combining modernist literary experimentation with narrative structures derived from the Bible. This unfinished work is seldom analyzed by literary scholars, in part because Fitzgerald's Christian conversion in the 1930s coincided with a mental breakdown, which made her faith and writing both suspect. Criticized as “incoherent,” the novel nonetheless becomes legible when Fitzgerald's religion is disentangled from madness and its contributions examined. The novel confesses the spiritual impoverishment of the Jazz Age protagonist, then seeks her redemption, healing the divide between the self and her soul, between the material world and the kingdom of God.

scholarly journals Embodying Asceticism: Masculinity, Manliness, and the Male Body in Muḥammad al-ʿArabī al-Darqāwī’s Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 128-154
Author(s):  
Brittany Landorf
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Material World ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
The World ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Corporeal Body

Abstract This study examines the logics of masculinity, manliness, and the corporeal male body in shaykh Muḥammad al-ʿArabī ibn Aḥmad al-Darqāwī al-Ḥasanī’s (d. 1239/1823) Majmūʿ Rasā⁠ʾil (“Collection of Epistles”). It argues that al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil constructed a prescriptive pious masculinity defined by mastery of the body and self, practical acts of ascetic devotion and humility, the hierarchical relationship between a Sufi master and his disciples, and the denigration of normative masculine virtues and behaviours. While al-Darqāwī instructed his followers to practice tajrīd, or divestment from the material world, and to eschew the habits of the men of murūʾa, this act did not seek to completely transcend the masculine body. Rather, his understanding of prescriptive pious masculinity was centred in embodied ascetic acts which created an analogous relationship between the physical act of purifying the corporeal body with the disciplining of the self (nafs). Mastering the body and the self, al-Darqāwī wrote, would lead to both growing near to God as well as, importantly, his Sufi followers’ mastery over other men, their wives and children, and even the natural environment. Al-Darqāwī’s Rasā⁠ʾil highlight the tension between Sufism as a spiritual and mystical path that seems to transcend gender hierarchies with its imbrication in epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies shaped by a masculine way of being in the world.

Can Psychiatry Reclaim its Soul? Psychiatry's Struggle Against a Dispirited Future

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Halasz
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Pervasive Developmental Disorder ◽  
Developmental Disorder ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Self ◽  
Facilitated Communication ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
Immortality Of The Soul ◽  
The Brain

Objectives: To examine reasons why ‘religion’ and ‘psychiatry’, as systems of belief, have a fraught, mistrustful relationship based on conflict regarding the source of knowledge. The former insists that revelation, not rational empirical evidence, the latter's claim for superiority, is the ultimate source that illuminates the soul, not just the self. This tension is illustrated with the case of ‘facilitated communication’, a method that purportedly improves communication for children with pervasive developmental disorder. The controversy highlights an aspect of the differences between ‘scientific’ and ‘religious’ discourse and offers a further dimension to contemporary psychiatry's crisis: the three-way tension between the brain-less, mind-less and soul-less psychiatry. Conclusion: The suggestion for a possible remedy is to revisit the source of discontent, the Aristotelian doctrine that challenged the ancient wisdom of the immortality of the soul.

scholarly journals Theologie als (her)interpretatie: Zesentwintig overwegingen

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gijsbert D.J. Dingemans
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Religious Thinking ◽  
The Relationship

Theology as (re)interpretation: Twenty-six considerations. The article consists of 26 points of reflection by means of which the nature of theological discourse is considered as a hermeneutical process. These indicators cover aspects such as the relationship between the natural sciences and religious thinking; hermeneutics; philosophy; ultimacy; symbolic meaningfulness; Old Testament roots; historical Jesus; Christological dogmatics; creation and Spirit; kenosis; and social concern. The article concludes in its last reflection with the claim that plurality in both religious discourse and ecclesiastical structures is the challenge for theology, so as to remain relevant in the present-day scientific discourse and religiosity and to be obedient to the vocation of Jesus.

Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-312
Author(s):  
Raffaele Cutolo
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Social Perspective ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Abstract This essay examines how Walter Pater’s work “Sebastian van Storck” (Imaginary Portraits) could provide for a new re-reading of Pater’s queerness from a de-constructivist viewpoint which investigates the borders of identity from an anti-social perspective. As a juxtaposition to 1970s theory of sexuality, the anti-social take involves a withdrawal of the homosexual from society, and a subsequent tendency to create a twofold separation: one from without, and one -more subtle- from within. The former entails a rupture between the homosexual Self and the heteronormative Other, the latter is an ontological division between the queer I and its internal culturally heteronormalised counterpart, to be viewed as yet another attempt of the fin-de-siècle complex Self to reach a compromise in a liminal time that could no longer be considered fully Victorian.

scholarly journals Science and the Scientific Disciplines

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
The Self ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Romantic Science

For a long time, empirical science lay outside the field of scholarship concerned with European Romanticism. Recently, however, Romanticism’s traditional reconstruction in terms of an exclusively literary absolute has been challenged and revised. It is now more frequently acknowledged that even the notion ofromantische Poesie, which had always appeared to affirm poetry as Romanticism’s sovereign form, quickly outgrew any stringently restrictive reference to literature. This chapter examines the self-grounding and self-depending character of Romantic scientific discourse. Modern scientific discourse has especially sought to repress such self-consciousness. Romantic science rather becomes an especially interesting variety of Romantic experience, because it seeks to preserve consciousness of the temporal and operational nature of its own statements, while not giving up on the positivity of description, the possibility of veridical reference to objects, or the sensible reality of material nature.

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