scholarly journals The Holonic Christ: Catholicity as Individuation and Integration

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 686
Author(s):  
Robert Nicastro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Depth Psychology ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Psychological Development ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
The Universe

The paradigm shift ushered in by the new science of the early twentieth century discloses the universe as a dynamic, energetic, and complex web of relationality. In view of this renewed sense of undivided wholeness, this article seeks to advance the growing synthesis of theology and depth psychology by way of a revised meaning of catholicity. Specifically, the article utilizes Carl Jung’s theory of individuation to suggest that catholicity is the conscious movement of the psyche toward wholeness, an outcome that Jung associated with Christ. The article introduces the term “Holonic Christ” to describe Christ as both the regulating principle of wholeness in nature and the co-recipient of the activity of deepening wholeness through the psychological development of the self-reflective individual. In this way, the article contends that catholicity is the process of individuation in its fullest form: a dynamic energy of the psyche that urges us in the direction of a more integrated personality, an ever-expanding community, and an eschatological remediation of divine self-contradiction made possible by human self-actualization. The article concludes with a discussion of the far-reaching religious implications of this study and explains why this new understanding of Christ is valuable to theological discourse.

Mock Mockers: Cynicism, Suffering, Irish Modernism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194
Author(s):  
Ronan McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Irish Modernism

Cynicism styles itself as the answer to the mental suffering produced by disillusionment, disappointment, and despair. It seeks to avoid them by exposing to ridicule naive idealism or treacherous hope. Modern cynics avoid the vulnerability produced by high ideals, just as their ancient counterparts eschewed dependence on all but the most essential of material needs. The philosophical tradition of the Cynics begins with the Ancients, including Diogenes and Lucian, but has found contemporary valence in the work of cultural theorists such as Peter Sloterdijk. This article uses theories of cynicism to analyze postcolonial disappointment in Irish modernism. It argues that in the “ambi-colonial” conditions of early-twentieth-century Ireland, the metropolitan surety of and suaveness of a cynical attitude is available but precarious. We therefore find a recursive cynicism that often turns upon itself, finding the self-distancing and critical sure-footedness of modern, urbane cynicism a stance that itself should be treated with cynical scepticism. The essay detects this recursive cynicism in a number of literary works of post-independence Ireland, concluding with an extended consideration of W. B. Yeats’s great poem of civilizational precarity, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Race War ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Indirect Rule

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

scholarly journals Deceived by orchids: sex, science, fiction and Darwin

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM ENDERSBY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Many

AbstractBetween 1916 and 1927, botanists in several countries independently resolved three problems that had mystified earlier naturalists – including Charles Darwin: how did the many species of orchid that did not produce nectar persuade insects to pollinate them? Why did some orchid flowers seem to mimic insects? And why should a native British orchid suffer ‘attacks’ from a bee? Half a century after Darwin's death, these three mysteries were shown to be aspects of a phenomenon now known as pseudocopulation, whereby male insects are deceived into attempting to mate with the orchid's flowers, which mimic female insects; the males then carry the flower's pollen with them when they move on to try the next deceptive orchid. Early twentieth-century botanists were able to see what their predecessors had not because orchids (along with other plants) had undergone an imaginative re-creation: Darwin's science was appropriated by popular interpreters of science, including the novelist Grant Allen; then H.G. Wells imagined orchids as killers (inspiring a number of imitators), to produce a genre of orchid stories that reflected significant cultural shifts, not least in the presentation of female sexuality. It was only after these changes that scientists were able to see plants as equipped with agency, actively able to pursue their own, cunning reproductive strategies – and to outwit animals in the process. This paper traces the movement of a set of ideas that were created in a context that was recognizably scientific; they then became popular non-fiction, then popular fiction, and then inspired a new science, which in turn inspired a new generation of fiction writers. Long after clear barriers between elite and popular science had supposedly been established in the early twentieth century, they remained porous because a variety of imaginative writers kept destabilizing them. The fluidity of the boundaries between makers, interpreters and publics of scientific knowledge was a highly productive one; it helped biology become a vital part of public culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

scholarly journals Life under another Sun: From Science Fiction to Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-39
Author(s):  
Michaël Gillon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Extraterrestrial Life ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
The Universe

Initiated in the sixteenth century, the Copernican revolution toppled our Earth from its theological pedestal, revealing it not to be the centre of everything but a planet among several others in orbit around one of the zillions of stars of our Universe. Already proposed by some philosophers at the dawn of this major paradigm shift, the existence of exoplanets, i.e. planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun, remained suspected but unconfirmed for centuries. It is only in the last decade of the twentieth century that the first of these extrasolar worlds were found. Their seminal discoveries initiated the development of more and more ambitious projects that led eventually to the detection of thousands of exoplanets, including a few dozen potentially habitable ones, i.e. terrestrial exoplanets that could harbour large amounts of liquid water – and maybe life – on their surfaces. Upcoming astronomical facilities will soon be able to probe the atmospheric compositions of some of these extrasolar worlds, maybe performing in the process the historical detection of chemical signs of life light-years away. But while the existence of extraterrestrial life remains pure speculation for now, it has been a major theme of science fiction for more than a century. By creating countless stories of encounters between humans and alien forms of life, science-fiction authors have pursued, in a sense, the Copernican revolution, confronting us with the idea that not only could life be widespread in the Universe, but also that our species may be far from the Cosmic pinnacle in matters of intelligence and technological development.

The Sovereign Logic of Jack London’s Sea Stories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hank Scotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Self ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
The Difference

Jack London’s maritime writing often interrogates the difference between the savage space of the “outside” sea and the relative domesticity of land’s civilized interior, as well as the ways in which this spatial distinction supports the sovereignty of space, society, and the self. But instead of maintaining these spatial differences, London’s work is all about exposing their increasing indistinction in the early twentieth century and the effects such a spatial destabilization had on sovereignty itself. This interrogation of the new world order and its effects on previous forms of sovereignty, the chapter argues, is what makes London’s contribution to American maritime writing (especially The Sea-Wolf and The Cruise of the Snark) so important. London’s sea stories not only acknowledge the world’s new “nomos” but the effects this order has on political and personal forms of autonomy and coherence.

EUGENICS AND PRAGMATISM: F. C. S. SCHILLER'S PHILOSOPHICAL POLITICS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-687 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADMIR SKODO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
The Self ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Broad Scope ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Eugenics Movement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
British Philosopher

The British philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This essay explores the relationship between Schiller's pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but also with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller's various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller's thought, this essay demonstrates that Schiller's eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller's eugenicism toward a distinctively nondeterministic and non-social-Darwinist kind.

‘What is a Beautiful Body?’

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 192-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Young Men ◽  
The Self ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article examines the emergence and spread of the ‘sportsman’ genre of Ottoman photography in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Istanbul. The ‘sportsman photograph’ depicted young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire, flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were embedded in a wider set of athletic and leisure activities and constituted novel social and photographic practices. By tracing the deployment of ‘sportsman’ photographs in sports clubs and the press, I argue that they cemented homosocial bonds, normalized and popularized new notions of masculinity, confessionalized the male body and reconfigured the ways in which Ottoman Muslims, Christians and Jews performed and conveyed their commitment to middle-class notions of masculinity and the self.

Complex Theatre: Science and Myth in Three Contemporary Performances

1998 ◽  
Vol 14 (54) ◽  
pp. 151-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara Gargano
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
World View ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
New Science ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Quantum Universe ◽  
The Universe ◽  
The Way

Today, argues Cara Gargano, we are at the cusp of a scientific paradigm shift which is having a profound influence on the way we construct our art and our identity. Like the shift from an oral to a literary mode of communication, or from a geocentric to a heliocentric world view, the movement from a Newtonian to a quantum world view has altered not only the way we understand our universe but the way we write and perform it. In recent years, critics David R. George, Natalie Crohn Schmitt, David Porush, and William Demastes have used terminology and concepts from the ‘new science’ to theorize about theatre. In this article Cara Gargano explores three new works that premiered in the 1995–96 New York City season – Rent, Interfacing Joan, and The Universe (ie, How It Works) – and discusses the way these performances rely, consciously or unconsciously, on this paradigm shift. She proposes that all three plays, while different in style, venue, and narrative, have at their base an assumption of a quantum universe – that is, they create a holistic mythology that gestures toward the theatre's origins as a ritual interaction with our world, and moves from a postmodern to a pre-millennial stance. Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, New Theatre Quarterly, and Dance and Research. Her recent article in Reliologiques deals with the myth of Orpheus as a model for the quantum world.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document