The Human Condition.
TL;DR: In some religious traditions, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness.
Abstract: Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:
Citations
More filters
Book•
[...]
27 Mar 2015
TL;DR: In this article, a series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human are presented, with a focus on the life of lines.
Abstract: To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human.
In the first part, Ingold argues that a world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks as commonly thought. He shows how the principle of knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings and bodies, and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there.
In the second part, Ingold argues that to study living lines, we must also study the weather. To complement a linealogy that asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, he develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere.
In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social.
This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world refreshingly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges widely over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.
410 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the fact that gender equality and women empowerment have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice.
Abstract: The language of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women’s rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies the language of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place among their major development priorities. And yet, this article argues, the fact that these terms have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice. Critically examining the trajectories of these terms in development, the article suggests that if the promise of the post-2015 agenda is to deliver on gender justice, new frames are needed, which can connect with and contribute to a broader movement for global justice.
271 citations
TL;DR: A network simulation model used to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions.
Abstract: The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media
223 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...The disappearance of media intermediation seems not to have, as was believed, fostered a space for direct meetings in a sort of online Habermasian public sphere, but rather to have implied that the “world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them” [6] (p....
[...]
...But despite early optimism about this ostensibly decentralized and democratic meetingplace, the online world seems less and less like a common “table” that “gathers us together” [6] (p....
[...]
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a mediation model to explain the relationship between CEO humility and firm performance and found that when a more humble CEO leads a firm, its top management team is more likely to collaborate, share information, jointly make decisions, and possess a shared vision.
215 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...Drawing on the communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958), we propose that humble CEOs do not stress power over other TMT members but, instead, have power to pursue goals for collective interest with the TMTs....
[...]
...In this sense, humble CEOs exercise power in a way that diverts from an interpersonal power perspective (Sturm & Antonakis, 2015) and complies with a communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958)....
[...]
TL;DR: The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies.
Abstract: Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrialscale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.
204 citations
References
More filters
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored how winter conditions are taken into account in urban planning in the city of Umea in northern Sweden and found that snow and harsh winter conditions were to some extent considered in urban plan.
Abstract: This study explores how winter conditions are taken into accountin urban planning in the city of Umea in northern Sweden. Snowand harsh winter conditions are to some extent considered in urban plan...
12 citations
TL;DR: The concept of regulation was a key means by which many Romantic-era authors sought to understand and direct relationships among life, the individual, and political collectives: for example, Immanu... as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The concept of regulation was a key means by which many Romantic-era authors sought to understand and direct relationships among life, the individual, and political collectives: for example, Immanu...
12 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define psychology as the science of mental life and define the concept of mental health as the "science of mental well-being" as defined by William James.
Abstract: William James famously defined psychology as the science of mental life. Much ink has since been spilled over the concept of the mental, but less so over the notion of life. In this article, I argu...
12 citations
TL;DR: In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a "crisis of natality" as mentioned in this paper, which can be interpreted as a kind of existential crisis.
Abstract: In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy...
12 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The authors provide a detailed account of the complexity of our individual experiences of power, to explore the implications of power within our everyday social relationships and to emphasize the empowering possibilities offered by the way that we live in the world with others.
Abstract: I remember when I was a child, there was a small hand painted wooden sign hanging in my grandfather’s shed. It depicted an elderly man standing on a world globe and underneath was written the phrase “Stop the world, I want to get off”. An understandable sentiment perhaps, but one which holds significant consequences for the world and the individual who wishes to escape it. As a child I struggled to understand what it was that the elderly man wished to escape, but as an adult it became clear to me that to find one’s place in the world required navigating a challenging path between power and freedom, one that was so difficult that occasionally it would have been beneficial to stop the world momentarily and to disembark temporarily. This idea raises an important question concerning how power in all its complexity mediates the relationship between the individual and their world. The answer to this question hinges on gaining a deeper understanding of how power is implicated in the activities through which human beings shape their world and how the world shapes human life and its possibilities.
My thesis is about power and how it mediates lived experience. My aim is to provide a detailed account of the complexity of our individual experiences of power, to explore the implications of power within our everyday social relationships and to emphasize the empowering possibilities offered by the way that we live in the world with others. This will be achieved through conceptual, practical and comparative analyses of the accounts of power offered by Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt. Foucault and Arendt are two highly original theorists whose key insights on the relationship between human beings and their world capture the intricacies of power and its role in human life.
While Foucault’s and Arendt’s accounts of power have been the focus of considerable scholarly analysis and debate in their own right, recently there has been a great deal of interest in the possibilities offered by a dual analysis of their work. Arendt’s and Foucault’s shared philosophical influences, their concern with modern politics and their rejection of traditional understandings of power have led an increasing number of scholars to explore the benefits of a twofold examination of Arendt’s and Foucault’s accounts of power (Villa, 1992; Allen, 1999 & 2001; Gordon, 2002; Dolan, 2005). The many interesting insights that have emerged from these varied analyses have not only articulated the many points of agreement and contention between Foucault’s and Arendt’s perspectives of power, but they have also further illuminated the complexity of the relationship between power and lived experience.
My thesis aims to enable a more detailed understanding of the many ways that power shapes human existence; the way that power promotes human autonomy, the suffering of those who are subject to power and the moral implications of the way in which we exercise power over ourselves and others. From the perspective of my own concerns about power, a set of particular assumptions about the character of human existence in the world will guide my analysis. Providing the framework for my discussion are the notions of inter-subjectivity and the world-mediated character of human lived experience. These concepts are associated with the existentialist tradition and significantly inform the approach of (such philosophers as) Freidrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. With its origins in the work of Hegel and Fichte, the notion that the existence of an individual self is predicated upon the existence of other selves was key to the existentialist writing of both Heidegger and Sartre (Cooper, in Crowell, 2012: 44).
Strongly influenced by the ideas of existential philosophy, Foucault and Arendt ground their accounts of power upon a set of shared suppositions and concerns about the character of human life (Villa, 1992; Allen, 1999 & 2001; Gordon, 2002). Building on the importance of this commonality I will emphasize the ways in which this shared world view provides a foundation for two distinctive accounts of power that emphasize different aspects of the relationship between human beings and the world. The accounts of power offered by Foucault and Arendt embody a set of key notions that at times are in conflict and at other times mutually imply each other. In examining these points of contention and agreement I will further the project of articulating Foucault’s and Arendt’s accounts of power as part of a wider framework. In this way I will offer an analysis that can reveal the complexity of the ways that power mediates lived experience in more detail.
12 citations