The contradictory human nature (original) (raw)

Introduction: An Encounter between the Poet and the Philosopher

Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us, 2021

Pessoa ... person ... persona ... personne ... Despite his iconic status in Portugal and constant re-readings of his writings, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains an enigma. This twentieth century philosophical poet of nothingness is an example par excellence of life as literature and of a literary plurality that allows us to hear a cacophony of voices and read a diversity of manifestos and perspectives. His famous invention of the ‘heteronym’ (Greek for “other name”) in literature liberates his ink bottle and takes him down a plethora of pathways and exploring various visions. His self-descriptions and descriptions of his unique art and personas include “Opening nothings”, “Prince of the Great Exile”, “Fictions of our own consciousness”, “The King of Gaps”, “The Argonaut of true sensations”, “Lost in God’s labyrinths”, “The interpreter of crisscrossing subjectivities”, “To pretend is to know ourselves”, “all life is a metaphysics in the darkness”, “a navigator engaged in unknowing myself”, “the vast colony of our being”, “the helpless slave of his multiplied self”, and a “soul” that “is a secret orchestra”. Fernando Pessoa is, as the late, great Eduardo Lourenço puts it, the “incomparable interpreter [...] of his own work” (Louren o 2010, 56). In the twenty-first century and the age of the internet, we are perhaps now finally catching up with Pessoa as we shift from experiences of divided selves to those of plural selves and non-selves.

Man's position in the universe. An insight in Frost's poetry

The present paper intends to focus realistic nature of Robert Frost's poetry as the man's position in the universe. Robert Frost, as a poet, may appear to be an escapist when we read his nature poetry but this is not true. He was not an escapist but a realist. This is why he has been considered a modern poet, as modern as W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot were. Frost was as sensitive as a poet as other great poets have been and he also could not shut his yes to the grim realities of life about which we read in his poetry again and again. The appeal of his poetry rests on so many things one of which is his awareness about the stark realities of life, the life that many appears to be unbearable. Man's environment is not merely out of understanding and impossible to reach. It also expresses great power in him because its sources are mysterious. This mysterious way of environment can be full of risk to man.

Poetry and Poetics: some critical-creative reflections

Itinera

Christopher Norris is Emeritus professor at Cardiff University. Recently, he began to address philosophical questions through poetry. In his paper, he explains why. Rather than expressing definite ideas in an elegant way, poetry can be intended as a process from which new ideas (also philosophical ones) can emerge. The result are a number of poems which cover a variety of issues, ranging from philosophy to politics, arts, history of ideas and science. Itinera has already begun to publish a few of these poems in previous issues and is now presenting three of them on painters (Turner, Matisse, Magritte).

From Character to Nature

The AnaChronisT

This paper discusses the theory of passions of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and David Hume (1711–1776). It focusses on two phrases: “ruling passion” by Pope and “predominant inclination” by Hume. This study attempts to demonstrate that Hume used his term with a similar meaning to that of Pope. The importance of the passions in the conduct of human life, according to these authors, involves a sceptical attitude towards the capabilities of reason. This paper attempts to show the manifestations of this attitude in Pope’s satires on human characters and in the characterisation of a false philosopher and philosophy by Hume.

Human Nature and Human Science

Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology, 2017

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects —has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.

NATURE-TRANSCENDENCE AND SELF-NATURE RELATIONS IN SANDOR WEÖRES'S POEMS

Studia Philologia, 2022

Nature-Transcendence and Self-Nature Relations in Sándor Weöres's Poems. In Sándor Weöres's poems flora and fauna are not only a decoration, serving as an allegorical/metaphorical background for the representation of the self's alienation and for the 20th century experience of a chaotic universe, but rather the reality of beings independent of subjective consciousness. This reality carries the already forgotten mysteries of the created world, and it definitely points towards a transcendent meaning, an ultimate goal. This paper examines how the specific relationship between self and nature can be associated with the peculiar worldview and the transcendental experiences of Weöres's poetry.

Twenty-first Century English Poetry towards Mantric Planes of Consciousness

International Journal of English and Literature, 2014

Sri Aurobindo, a man of the supramental plane of consciousness has found 'Mantra' to be the future of Poetry, the poetry which expresses the deepest spiritual reality. He discovers that poetry written from some higher plane of, what he calls, the Intuitive Mind Consciousness and Over mind Consciousness, the two uppermost planes of spiritual consciousness on the plane of Mind is the Mantra. Since man is yet to evolve to these higher planes of the spiritual mind-consciousness, the Mantra is the future poetry. On examination of Tomas Transtromer's Answers to Letters and some other poems of the present century it is found that the evolution of consciousness is going on, and the poetic consciousness is destined to evolve to such higher planes of the Mantric Consciousness.

Ethics and poetry. Jasna C. Nimac - Croatia

Although from the times of Herod and Hesiod, poetry pointed to virtues and values, even in its own specific way, in today's literary and philosophical-ethical theory, however, we can only find a rare debate about this unusual relationship. Some see the reason for this in the dominant academic and professional profilation of the theory of ethics which, encouraged by Spinoza, all the more strived towards a more empirical and mathematical method in discovering the nature of ethics, as well as the endeavor of literary criticism to meet the academic standards that neglect the connection between literary studies and civic virtues, and turn exclusively to a formalistic and aesthetic criteria. But while in the last few decades in the field of ethics we witness an "ethical turn" in terms of intensive preoccupation with ethics within the public domain, precisely in the area of medicine, economics, psychology, ecology, etc., literary criticism, on the other hand, in the eyes of many critics it still seems quite absent from public debate and there is less interest in the practical and ethical dimension of the text. However, in recent decades a small group of literary critics (F. R. Leavis, W. C. Booth, G. Marshall, J. Hills Miller, N. Carroll, etc.) is turning towards the consideration of ethical problems within literature.