Many map users have wondered why Portugal, sharing with Spain the Iberian Peninsula, ever became a separate nation. That question is answered with remarkable clarity by Dan Stanislawski. This book also presents an analysis of the factors that produce separate nations and offers a study of the evolution of national cultures generally, especially as they apply to Portugal.
The undoubted fact of human individuality has remained outside the field of interest of scientific psychology. Neither the central organization of consciousness nor individual powers of action have been dealt with in substantial research programmes. Yet every facet of our mental lives is influenced by how our minds are organized. How much of this organization comes from the languages and social practices of the cultures into which we are born is undetermined.
In this book, Rom Harré explores the radical thesis that most of our personal being may be of social origin. Consciousness, agency and autobiography are the three unities which make up our personal being. Their origin in childhood development and their differences in different cultures are explored.
Nevertheless, despite the overwhelming influence of social environment on mental structure, individual identity is a central facet of Western culture. How is the formation of such identity possible? Rom Harré ends with the suggestion that personal identity derives from the complementary powers of human beings both to display themselves socially as unique and to create novel linguistic forms making individual thought and feeling possible.
An influential thinker on the concept of singularity and its implications on politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and literature
For readers versed in critical theory, German and comparative literature, or media studies, a new book by Samuel Weber is essential reading. Singularity is no exception. Bringing together two decades of his essays, it hones in on the surprising implications of the singular and its historical relation to the individual in politics, theology, economics, psychoanalysis, and literature. Although singularity has long been a keyword in literary studies and philosophy, never has it been explored as in this book, which distinguishes singularity as an “aporetic” notion from individuality, with which it remains historically closely tied.
To speak or write of the singular is problematic, Weber argues, since once it is spoken of it is no longer strictly singular. Walter Benjamin observed that singularity and repetition imply each other. This approach informs the essays in Singularity. Weber notes that what distinguishes the singular from the individual is that it cannot be perceived directly, but rather experienced through feelings that depend on but also exceed cognition. This interdependence of cognition and affect plays itself out in politics, economics, and theology as well as in poetics. Political practice as well as its theory have been dominated by the attempt to domesticate singularity by subordinating it to the notion of individuality. Weber suggests that this political tendency draws support from what he calls “the monotheological identity paradigm” deriving from the idea of a unique and exclusive Creator-God.
Despite the “secular” tendencies usually associated with Western modernity, this paradigm continues today to inform and influence political and economic practices, often displaying self-destructive tendencies. By contrast, Weber reads the literary writings of Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Kafka as exemplary practices that put singularity into play, not as fiction but as friction, exposing the self-evidence of established conventions to be responses to challenges and problems that they often prefer to obscure or ignore.
The Ancrene Wisse is a spiritual guide for female recluses, written at the request of three young anchoresses who were voluntarily enclosed for life within small cells. With rare sensitivity and discernment, Linda Georgianna analyzes this complex and skillfully composed treatise and examines its detailed portrayal of the rich, sometimes rewarding and sometimes frustrating inner life of the solitary. Georgianna sees in the author’s practical and spiritual counsel, ranging from advice on owning a cat to the confession of sin, an assumption that exterior and interior realities are inextricably bound in the solitary life, which becomes a highly self-conscious journey through human experience.
The Solitary Self offers both a reading of this linguistically difficult text and a study of those contemporary intellectual and cultural concerns—particularly the widespread interest in the psychology of sin, confession, and repentance—which help to explain the Ancrene Wisse author’s insistence upon self-awareness and individuality in the solitary life.
Published in 1918, The View of Life is Georg Simmel’s final work. Famously deemed “the brightest man in Europe” by George Santayana, Simmel addressed diverse topics across his essayistic writings, which influenced scholars in aesthetics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, certain core issues emerged over the course of his career—the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms, and the nature and conditions of authentic individuality, including the role of mindfulness regarding mortality. Composed not long before his death, The View of Life was, Simmel wrote, his “testament,” a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety.
Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger’s Being and Time and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jürgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.
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