The crisis of the modernity and the enigma of man

Korunk, a "vallás és filozófia utáni kor" szellemi válsága, 2020

This study examines that spiritual soillessness which one has culminated nowadays, in the age of post-postmodernity. I prove two aspects here: 1. Europianism characterizes a hiding and immanent spiritual dichotomy, 2. It is impossible to dissolve the – by the scientifical-technological civilization caused – nihilism via traditionalism, just because the Europian historical past – as spiritually Christian-Platonic metaphysics might be oneself nihilism as well.

Altarul reîntregirii, 2017

This paper wishes to be a Christian-Orthodox answer before the deleterious tendencies of the modern man, so much invoked by postmodernity. Appearing under different evolutionist, existentialist, hedonist, libertinism concepts or different slogans (such as "get religion out of school" or "we want hospitals, not cathedrals"), its final purpose is to deride God and to send Him in an enclosed space. Sitting on this prestigious pedestal, the modern man feels "free" to anchor himself, massively, into visibility, giving birth to a new diversity of idols that undermine dialogue and destroys transparency. In this vicious circle of the desire for excess of possession and objectual manipulation, for the contemporary man the ontological identity of "image of the Archetype" becomes rather discomfortable, embracing phantasms that are spiritually baneful. Thus, the universe in not perceived as a space destined to transfiguration through the liturgical acts, but as a good place to idolize and consume.

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2012

The aim of the present dissertation is to offer a new reading of the role of the body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I will focus on passage §312, which immediately precedes the discussion on Physiognomy and Phrenology. I will read this passage in the context of the chapter on Reason. The idea of Reason is, I argue, to search for an organic whole, a shape (Gestalt) in nature. A self-developing, independent Gestalt is found instead in the human body. I will analyse how the human body, however, fails as a Gestalt, and how this failure is at the same time a failure of an organicist world-view. The challenge will be to analyse the nature of the Hegelian body, while recognizing that Hegel himself does not analyse it further. I will ask if the Hegelian body is that of psychoanalysis, by referring to Lacan’s theory of the formative function of the Gestalt of the body. I claim that the Hegelian body is similar but ultimately incompatible with the Lacanian one. I will find a striking similarity however with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s idea of a body without organs. I will look at the Hegelian body through the analysis of bodies without organs in A Thousand Plateaus. Finally, the ambition will be to problematize Deleuze’s and Guattari’s idea of a body without organs by seeing it all too compatible with Hegel’s analysis of the phrenologist’s body. I will also argue that Hegel’s analysis of the human body in §312 has an important historical dimension, which we have to take into account when we discuss the ethics of a bodies without organs on the one hand, and the nature of the Hegelian body on the other.

The modern world understands itself as being something entirely new in the history of mankind. Modernity describes itself as the age in which mankind reaches adulthood and in which man becomes free and emancipates itself from external constraints and determination. The present-day world was born due duet o a new understanding of man, world, society, and due to the development of technology and afterward sciences. This development is presented as a continuous march toward inescapable progress, and as asteadly increase in rationality which will lead to the complete and total emancipation of man. But modernity is not the product of only reason and technical and supposed moral progress. The tools to understand the real forces behind this development that created modern world can be find in the works of Pierre-Andre Taguieff and in the sociology of Jacques Ellul. The first offers a deep analysis of a concept that undergirds modernity, the concept of emanicpations, and the other author describes the development of modernity as amounting to the total suversion of reality through the technological system.The forces fueling this state of affairs are greed and lust for power. The wish of total emancipation can be seen as another expression of what psychoanalysis called the infantile wish to omnipotence.

Resumo: Mediante exposição das teorias de Erich Fromm e de Zygmunt Bauman, pretendo refletir sobre diagnóstico apresentado por esses dois pensadores acerca da condição humana na era técnica da informatização que cada vez mais altera o ritmo dos processos vitais de nossa atual ordem social. Exponho a contínua alienação das qualidades intrínsecas impostas pela sociedade de consumo e pelo efeito nocivo gerado pela moda na subjetividade individual, submetida, em geral, às regras da necessidade de aceitação social na vida coletiva. Erich Fromm pensa a história da sociedade ocidental mediante o conflito entre "Ser" e "Ter", ou seja, entre o princípio de qualidade existencial e o princípio quantitativo que norteia o desejo humano por riqueza e controle total sobre as condições materiais de sua existência; Bauman, por sua vez, desenvolve o conceito de "liquidez humana", situação que se manifesta indubitavelmente nos diversos âmbitos de nosso fracassado projeto civilizatório, em decorrência da transformação do ser humano, singular, em objeto de consumo, descartável, situação, portanto, que se manifesta mesmo nas relações interpessoais cotidianas.

Religion Compass, 2007

The aim of this article is to examine the role of the body in contemporary spirituality. The body is understood here as being simultaneously individual and social, a corporeal phenomenon, that is, on one hand, a ‘lived experience’ that forms the basis of self-identity and, on the other, an entity affected by the social system. As such, the body plays an important role in mediating the relationship between one's self-identity and one's social identity. This article focuses on three particular contemporary phenomena: the conceptualizations of the body presented by both the New Age movements and feminism (especially ecofeminism), as well as the trend towards modifying the body in particular ways, primarily through tattooing and piercing. These movements are understood in terms of Anthony Giddens’ broader conceptualization of the conditions of life in late modernity, in particular his discussion of the reflexive project of identity, and his and other theorists’ speculations on the new grounds for spirituality in the face of heightened ontological uncertainty of our times. I will show that, during the processes of both autonomous self-expression and identity (trans)formation, the body (as well as the self) is being sacralized, in the sense that it is treated as the subject, rather than an object, through which an individual undertakes the quest for spiritual development.

The question of whether man, in the Heraclitean principle of change, is continuous or discontinuous, and to what end man’s being transcends to is of important discourse in this paper. Does Man flux from death to nothingness, and from nothingness to somethingness? What does it mean to be human, to die and to experience change and human transcendence? The frequent nature of death, the death of loved ones and friends elicit lamentations and sorrows, but more importantly, it expresses human incapacity, fear of the unknown, lack of knowledge of death, and of what it means to die. Such attitude or confusion, may have informed the interrogative of Job (14:14): If man dies shall he live again? It also agitates the triad of Adadevo: If a man lives to die, does he die to live? If God is life, is God death also? If life is a means to an end, is death the end? (Adadevo 2008;38) These questions necessarily require rational answers though, they exemplify the character and paradox of human existence; the more the knowledge of man about man, the more Man understands that he knows little about his being. The paper argues on this score that, as a being that encapsulate change, discontinuity and continuity, man’s dissolution through death is not an external and public fact that creates a sense of loss and saddens humanity, but an internal possibility of his being. It is the fulfillment of the Man project of self liberation, self transcendence, and a process of surpassing one’s existential condition. We shall argue further that, in this form of change, man ceases to be the impersonal social being among beings and has freed himself from the servitude of the anonymous “they” and thereby opened himself to his own most potentiality for being. In birth, there is the change of nonbeing to being, of nothingness to somethingness. In death man changes his constitution of somaticity to pure being; to a spiritual reality. We shall argue the conclusion that, in death, Man further becomes the most vitalizing fact of life and the cardinal indicator of authentic selfhood. He transcends from nothingness to somethingness.

STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY / ESTUDIOS DE PSICOLOGÍA, 2023

This article argues that there is a crisis in the conception of what is human, resulting from the growing tendency to uncritically accept the assumptions of the technological paradigm or episteme and the model of the future that this approach takes for granted. In the authors’ opinion, this state of a!airs derives from successive scis- sions that have taken place in the history of our development as a species (the scission of the cerebral hemispheres) and in the history of thought and science ("rst-order cybernetics versus sec- ond-order cybernetics; inert matter versus living matter; the tech- nological versus the organic; natural intelligence versus arti"cial intelligence). In the face of the apparent triumph of the mechan- istic assumptions that support transhumanism, the principles that have governed the origin and evolution of life are recalled, as well as the constitutive principles of the human psyche, among which the construction of consciousness and freedom, called for from Vygotskian Acmeist psychology, should be highlighted. These principles are those which, in the authors’ opinion, should govern any alternative for the future. // Se plantea en este artículo que hay una crisis en la concepción de lo humano, fruto de la tendencia creciente a aceptar acríticamente los supuestos del paradigma o epistema tecnológico y el modelo de futuro que en este enfoque se da por asumido. A juicio de los autores, este estado de cosas deriva de sucesivas escisiones que han tenido lugar en la historia de nuestra constitución como especie (la escisión de los hemisferios cerebrales) y en la historia del pensamiento y la ciencia (cibernética de primer orden frente a la de segundo orden; materia inerte frente a materia viva; lo tecnológico frente a lo orgánico; inteligencia natural frente a inteligencia arti"cial). Ante el aparente triunfo de los supuestos mecanicistas que soportan el transhumanismo, se recuerdan los principios que han regido el origen y la evolución de la vida, así como los principios constitutivos de la psique humana entre los que cabe destacar la construcción de la conciencia y la libertad, reclamados desde la psicología acmeísta vygotskiana. Esos principios son los que a juicio de los autores deben regir la alternativa de futuro.

The Rise and Fall of Moderrn Man, 2017

„The rise and fall of the modern man” is a philosophical anthropology essay meditating about who historically modern man was and is, especially in terms of modern man’s self-knowledge and its connection to these specifically modern inventions made by humanity that have been from ca. 16th Century up until now science and technology. It is a brief history of the idea of man as a subject of self-knowledge in the modern era. Self-knowledge is understood both as a concept of human nature that guided human endeavors and the resulting universal history, and also as individual self-consciousness made possible by the idea that each and every human being is an autonomous rational agent, an independent atom of humanity, or a self-reliant monad. The main track of the essay’s meditation is a narrative that shows how this initial assumption about modern humanity (coined in the rational age of enlightenment) and the resulting belief in man’s individual skill, potential, and power (properties that enabled what could be called anthropocratic era after theocratic middle ages) was shaping history between 16th and 21st Century, and how it later was itself reshaped, or even questioned and ultimately falsified by the events of a more mature, post-enlightened modernity, beginning in the time of French Revolution, and ending in the calamities of the 20th Century. Modernity began as a self-elevation of man and his taking over of many of previously God’s exclusive faculties – the primary being infinity (of knowledge, power, earthly time, space). This general event made man a solitary ruler of the world, an event described in the modernity’s best selling book ever, Robinson Crusoe (second only to the Bible in the number of editions and copies). As modern history evolved, run to a large extent by a new dynamics provided by scientific achievements and resulting technological inventions that kept constantly changing the face of earth in a pace unprecedented ever before, human self-knowledge gained new experiences and developed as much towards more rational approach as it also became more and more self-conscious of the man’s irrationality, and inner vulnerability. Nietzsche’s overman is an illustration of the exhaustion of the idea of man’s self-mastering and self-improvement that had been actually first exposed by Pico della Mirandola already in the 15th Century; the more the German philosopher attempted at reshaping the concept of the super-human, the more it entangled in an infinite complexity that resulted finally in a deconstruction of the very idea of super-human (as “Thus spoke Zaratustra”, to give an example, has no ultimate sense). Modern era, with its original promise of emancipation and individual prosperity for all human beings on earth, a promise that could not have been ever made by any other age, ultimately led to the anthropological catastrophe of the 20th Century, an event that still defines our late- or post-modern self-understanding as humans. The essay ends with an attempt at depicting the condition of humanity now, in the beginning of the 21st Century, especially by reference to the contemporary status of subjectivity and self-knowledge. We live in the post-modern graveyard of the modern ideas – e.g. Man, Reason, Subject, etc. – a landscape in which the old known uncertainty of the future was replaced by a newly recognized certainly worse tomorrow. Still however some individuals have the opportunity to long for being themselves and knowing themselves, however this longing might seem elusive, wishful, privileged and unimportant. How can one ask the question “Who am I” in an age when this seems perhaps particularly old-fashioned, based on questionable premises, and also an elitist luxury? How can one not ask this question – and also its derivatives like “what do I want?”, “what is best for me?”, “where am I going?”. Some of us still feel that we have a moral right to ask these questions, that is to self-knowledge which seems something universally needed, even if the contemporary course of world events, with its constantly growing obscurity, is still more cruelly disavowing all sorts of pretence that hide behind anybody’s striving for deeper self-awareness. The feelings of alienation, humiliation, diminishment and anonymity are experiences that almost inevitably in most cases accompany the exercise of an introvert egocentricism and self-contemplation (that first word being already charged in everyday use shall be re-read by the reader to mean something neutral, self-orientation of thought) – the exercise that ceaselessly oscillates between guilt (of “narcissism”) and an even worse than guilt feeling of a certain powerlessness and idiocy of such an activity (by many not recognized to be an activity at all). In such conditions the ancient motto “Know Thyself” may seem a noble but ridiculous anachronism, however the whole essay is trying most sincerely, even if provocatively, to defend it as the most human of activities.