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
01 Apr 2017
TL;DR: The concept of anthropogenic climate change is now understood in the discipline of International Relations (IR) as an urgent environmental problem enveloping the globe, and it underlies recent claims that humanity's impact on the Earth's natural systems is so consequential that a new geologic epoch has begun: The Anthropocene, or the human age as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The concept of anthropogenic climate change is now understood in the discipline of International Relations (IR) as an urgent environmental problem enveloping the globe. It underlies recent claims that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s natural systems is so consequential that a new geologic epoch has begun: The Anthropocene, or the ‘human age’. Yet, IR’s increasing engagement and use of these scientific concepts raises significant questions the discipline has yet to address. For instance, if global climate change appeared in international politics only as recently as the late-1980s, what spurred this sudden emergence? If the Anthropocene appeared only after 2000, then how does this new concept affect the way we now think about global politics, the Earth, and even ourselves? This thesis answers these questions by arguing that the concepts of global climate change and the Anthropocene are neither immutable nor universal scientific truths or natural objects. Rather, they emerged when technological advances in nuclear physics and models tracing bomb radiocarbon intersected with the ways states govern their territories and subjects. The global nature or ‘climatic globality’ of these concepts, therefore, is a manner of conducting and steering human conduct and action by establishing the boundaries of subjectivity when they are thought. This is what Michel Foucault called governmentality. It is demonstrated in this thesis through a genealogical tracing of climate change in IR, focusing on how nuclear sciences, computational modelling technologies, and regimes of international governance, overlapped to form the climatic globality IR now takes for granted. Combining genealogy with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, a new form of global governmentality becomes evident. Through a technological and metaphysical subjectivism with the carbon atom as its substrate, the human self now asserts itself from atomic to global scales, as the maker, master, and steward, of the Earth.
24 citations
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: This paper explored the historical development of the World Bank's work in higher education broadly, as well as in two specific countries, Morocco and Indonesia, through a critical historical method, which combines traditional historical analysis with a critical policy studies lens.
Abstract: Since 1962, the World Bank has involved itself in higher education discourse and practice through the provision of loans and grants to developing nations. Initially, such involvement focused primarily on tangible infrastructure projects such as building schools and providing textbooks for students. Over time, however, the Bank has increasingly come to involve itself in less tangible projects such as policy work, technical assistance, and educational discourse – including the creation of the imaginary of the Global Knowledge Economy (GKE). Through this increased focus on higher education policy and discourse, the Bank has come to wield increasing authority over the discourse of knowledge and its means of production. In order to better elucidate the rising authority of the World Bank over higher education and discourses of knowledge production, this dissertation explores the historical development of the Bank’s work in higher education broadly, as well as in two specific countries, Morocco and Indonesia. The dissertation studies the Bank’s involvement in higher education through a critical historical method, which combines traditional historical analysis with a critical policy studies lens. Through this analysis, I argue that the authority of the World Bank over the discourse and practice of higher education and knowledge production has increased significantly through time due to the Bank’s role in the creation of a new global profession of higher education economists, and that this increased authority reveals an underlying irony in the Bank’s thinking and operations. The irony is that the Bank relies upon a fundamental belief in the power of free markets in the economic sphere, but increasingly deploys methods of centralized planning over higher education and knowledge production through these new professionals. This profession is allowed to flourish in part because the Bank and the GKE both exist within a global realm in which the global public sphere has not been clarified. This dissertation adds to the historical record of the Bank’s involvement in higher education discourse, policy and practice, while also exploring the need for more robust theories of the public sphere and for alternative views of knowledge and education at the global level. INDEX WORDS: World Bank, Higher education, History, Global knowledge economy, Morocco, Indonesia THE POWER AND PERIL OF GLOBAL PROFESSIONALIZATION: THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY, THE WORLD BANK, AND HIGHER EDUCATION
24 citations
12 Mar 2019
TL;DR: In this paper, a distinction between liberalisme and capital antiliberalism is made between travaux and the pratique economique contemporaine: travail without valeur comptable, capital antiniliberal, Etat capitaliste.
Abstract: Cette these sur travaux s’appuie pour l’essentiel sur un ouvrage publie en 2006, Le liberalisme contre le capitalisme (Paris, Fayard), dont il est egalement propose une version augmentee et mise a jour. Le propos consiste d’abord a examiner les contradictions entre le liberalisme tel qu’il est defini dans la Richesse des nations d’Adam Smith et la pratique economique contemporaine : travail sans valeur comptable, capital antiliberal, Etat capitaliste. Il en ressort que la synonymie largement partagee entre « liberalisme » et « capitalisme » releve de l’ideologie, ideologie que l’on peut qualifier de totalitarisme en reference au travail d’Hannah Arendt, en l’espece de « totalitarisme mou ». Il est ainsi opere dans la sphere economique une distinction entre les pratiques, les normes qui les faconnent, les theories censees rendre compte des pratiques, et les discours, pouvant prendre la forme de l’ideologie. Cette distinction ouvre une voie pour penser l’economie autrement, sous des modalites differentes de celles proposees par la Theorie de la Justice de John Rawls. Dans la lignee de l’analyse faite par Ludwig Wittgenstein des jeux de langage, il s’agit en l’occurrence de reprendre a leur racine la definition des acteurs economiques et la nature de leur langage (le langage comptable en particulier).
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the attempt to organize in order to secure permanent housing among poor urban families in Buenos Aires who reside temporarily in government-subsidized welfare hotels, and examine the passage that appears to take place between the ever-present tropes of "need" and being assisted and being an activist in an autonomous and project-oriented movement.
Abstract: In this paper I explore the attempt to organize in order to secure permanent housing among poor urban families in Buenos Aires who reside temporarily in government-subsidized welfare hotels. My aim is to examine the passage that appears to take place between the ever-present tropes of “need” (and being assisted) and of “patience” (and being an activist in an autonomous and project-oriented movement) in the families’ experience of time as they embark collectively in this endeavor. I argue that as activists strive to move away from the subject position of asistido into which social programs seem to place them, they assume a political engagement that requires “patience,” a kind of work necessary for overriding the feeling of urgency often connected with a condition of need.
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore and discuss three interweaving constructs Eros (or a tale of the self) calls for an expression of the individuality in organizations, in terms of creativity, sense making and experience, and trust contributes to explore trustworthy relationships, welcoming the other and enabling individuals to flourish in the workplace.
Abstract: Despite its undoubted centrality in modern society, Love has not received the attention it deserves in the study of organizations Among the reasons for this avoidance is the fact that love is passionate and not authoritative; personal and subjective but not public To understand the way organizational research can incorporate love, I explore and discuss three interweaving constructs Eros (or a tale of the self) calls for an expression of the individuality in organizations, in terms of creativity, sense making and experience Philia (or a tale of trust) contributes to explore trustworthy relationships, welcoming the other and enabling individuals to flourish in the workplace Agape (or a tale of compassion) refers to generalized love for humanity and opens to the understanding of compassionate leadership In the discussion, I call for new directions in the study of love as the organization and the organization as love
24 citations