Interdisciplinary Studies

The study investigated the narcissism, worker relations, and social media addiction of 51 employees working in a telecommunication organization located in Laguna.  The study was launched as part of profiling employees’ narcissistic tendencies, exploring conflicts among employees, determining connections among the variables, and understanding the impacts of social media to their work life.  The researchers used purposive sampling in identifying the respondents who completed three instruments that measured the research variables namely: Narcissistic Personality Inventory-40 by Raskin and Hall, Social Media Addiction Scale by Arslan and Kirik, and Worker Relations Scale by Biggs and his colleagues. Data analysis required the use of Pearson’s r and was facilitated by the application of SPSS Software. Results showed that employees have a normal level of narcissism (M = 13.32). The respondents tend to exhibit only few to one particular narcissistic behavior and is/are not destructive to thy self nor to others. Good workplace relationships are observed in the organization as they scored a high level of worker relations (x̅ = 5.76). It is also found that the respondents execute moderate levels of social media addiction (x̅ = 2.95), in which they are fairly engaged in social media and not extremely attached. Furthermore, results revealed that there are no significant relationships among the three variables.  To gain better insights of the results, informal interviews were also conducted to selected respondents.  The implications to research and practice are discussed in the study.

Introduction Jacques Derrida performed a deconstructive analysis similar that to a semiotic analysis of the psyche. He built a bridge to construct a path between Heidegger's Nazism and his use of the term spirit in German language. The central theme of Derrida's work is to emphasize Heidegger's failure to avoid Nazism in his works. This avoidance was represented by the German term Vermeiden which means to dodge, to flee, or to avoid. Derrida's analysis composed of multiple points wherein he connected the concept of spirit to animality, Being, Dasein, and the Question. Primarily, this analysis was connected to Heidegger's speech wherein his Nazism was officially announced: Heidegger's Rectoral Address entitled The Self-Assertion of the German University. Heidegger was elected rector at the University of Freiburg and during these times, he became a member and supporter of the National Socialist party of Germany. Derrida's analysis of Heidegger's Nazism was primarily connected to his reading of the Rectoral Address in relation to his other works, such as Sein und Zeit.

Alienation in the Metaverse: The Isolation of Desires in the Future of Hyperrealism by Danyael Dedeles "Today, abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal." 1

Danyael L. Dedeles "There is time for life to spread beyond the Earth throughout the entire Cosmos, provided the planet's biosphere isn't destroyed. [...] A proper understanding of our terrestriality and morality does not imply any restriction of our horizons. There will always be new ways of life to be invented, for there are as many different ways of living as there are people; provided we rediscover our heterogeneity and resist the insidious normalization of our lives."

With its throttling, its stasis, its lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms, establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its roles, propagates its programs ... Using every available access route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, subjugates all lived experience to the control of its condemning judgments."

Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche argued the importance of affirmation in an active life which considers negation as a product of the reactivity of the dialectical slave from perceiving the world as a series of oppositions and contradictions. Negation for Deleuze is a poor reading of the tragic because the Apollonian-Dionysian antitheses must not be viewed as a contradiction, and consider the Dionysian, the tragic character, as the joy of original being resolved from the sufferings of dream and individuation represented by Apollo. This paper will critically examine the role of negation from the biological standpoints of toxicology, ontogenetics, phylogenetics, and epigenetics, interrelating the concepts of homeostasis and hormesis with transformational processes. These points will be justified from criticizing Deleuze and Guattari's notion of anti-production and the Body without Organs in their works Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Concepts in Japanese Aesthetics such as shizen, yūgen, mono no aware, musubi, and jo-ha-kyu [ma] will further be used to elaborate on the importance of negation in today's society by discussing the relationship between intensities, refrains, restrains, and sustains, proposing the quantum wave as alternative to the rhizome.

There almost always arise questions regarding what makes Filipino philosophy Filipino enough to give its identity enough justice. Some would argue that its identification requires escape from external influences to gain its uniqueness and originality. Others would claim that identities are merely illusory

This work is a non-traditional revisualization of the Japanese aesthetic concept of shizen to be connected with Han’s discussions on strife for achievement, loss of rituals, and the lack of veil in our present society. It aims to critically examine two main aesthetic qualities present in Japanese shrines: entropy and obscurity. By elaborating on the two qualities and interrelating them to Byung-Chul Han’s views on rituals, algophobia, and transparency, we could contrast such qualities with the new forms of exploitation performed by neoliberal capitalism and analyze how such aesthetics could be a resistance against commercializing spaces. The rearrangement of spaces will be interrelated to paranoia and obsessive-compulsion to understand the origin of standardized systems through the antithesis of entropy and perpetual motion. Furthermore, I will attempt to partially concretize the qualities of Japanese aesthetics through practice, such as agriculture, architectural landscaping, and interior design. By analyzing the lightings and physical structures of actual places in Japan through Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s opinions in his work In Praise of Shadows, such qualities of entropy and obscurity are to be associated with the presence of mosses, shadows, and placidity in purist Japanese design. The main goal of this paper is to extract some qualities of Japanese Shinto shrines and propose their possible reapplications to physical structures of different cultural belongings. I will conclude this work by expounding on how harmonizing with the disharmonies of shizen will provide us resonant and sensible spaces, and further act as a new form of resistance engraved within sensibility against the neoliberal alienation.