hungching1982

[hungching1982]

How East and West think in profoundly different ways

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170118-how-east-and-west-think-in-profoundly-different-ways

"In 2010, an influential article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences reported that the vast majority of psychological subjects had been “western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic”, or ‘Weird’ for short. Nearly 70% were American, and most were undergraduate students hoping to gain pocket money or course credits by giving up their time to take part in these experiments."

"Crucially, our “social orientation” appears to spill over into more fundamental aspects of reasoning. People in more collectivist societies tend to be more ‘holistic’ in the way they think about problems, focusing more on the relationships and the context of the situation at hand, while people in individualistic societies tend to focus on separate elements, and to consider situations as fixed and unchanging."

"And this thinking style also extends to the way we categorise inanimate objects. Suppose you are asked to name the two related items in a list of words such as “train, bus, track”. What would you say? This is known as the “triad test”, and people in the West might pick “bus” and “train” because they are both types of vehicles. A holistic thinker, in contrast, would say “train” and “track”, since they are focusing on the functional relationship between the two – one item is essential for the other’s job."

Read: 2024-03-03 20:10

[hungching1982]

Writing Wrongs Why Academics Write So Badly and How That Hurts Them

https://areomagazine.com/2020/07/06/writing-wrongs-why-academics-write-so-badly-and-how-that-hurts-them/

"If academics could be induced to produce readable prose, their day-to-day professional lives would be greatly improved and the general public would be more inclined to respect our centres of higher learning."

"If academics cannot bring themselves to write in ways that are engaging and accessible, they will have no means of convincing taxpayers and voters that the work they do is important and therefore deserves support and funding."

"If a humanities scholar cannot even communicate effectively in writing, she will not be able to persuade others that an education in her field produces any transferable skills."

"In much of academe, the primary purpose of writing is not communication but signalling. An article does not exist to be read or to add to the sum total of knowledge in the world so much as to provide a line on an academic’s CV."

Read: July 12, 2020 at 09:53PM

[hungching1982]

The Usefulness of Our Delusions

https://behavioralscientist.org/the-usefulness-of-our-delusions/

"But the brilliance of our newest mental faculties has caused many intelligent people to believe a startling untruth—​that logic and rationality are all that matter."

"Rather than seek to annihilate self-deception and all it represents, a better goal would be to think carefully about what it does, and ask ourselves how we can work with it."

"We are not just in a war with con artists, conspiracy theorists, and demagogues. We are in a war with ourselves."

"I realized that one reason people cling to false beliefs is because self-​deception can sometimes be functional—it enables us to accomplish useful social, psychological, or biological goals"

"Believing that reason and logic are all that matter is like imagining that a great city is only about its present, that the past does not matter and plays no role in shaping it."

Read: 2021-08-19 01:06

[hungching1982]

This Simple Psychological Trick Makes Customers Love Your Product

https://www.fastcompany.com/90640310/this-simple-psychological-trick-makes-customers-love-your-product

"Do we really enjoy things more when they’re serendipitous discoveries rather than something we carefully choose ourselves?"

"It turns out, we do. And the phenomenon is significant enough that Durante believes that products should be designed around surprise rather than painstaking curation."

"Most of us have heard about the paradox of choice. While people say they want options and the opportunity to shape their own destiny, the truth is that deciding between a long list of products or menu items can actually cause a lot of stress and make us unhappy."

"The impact of serendipity was powerful in testing, offering anywhere from a 10% to a 25% increase in enjoyment and satisfaction of a product or experience."

"Such serendipity doesn’t need to be random, either. It just needs to seem random. Because her research suggests that customers will enjoy their products more for it."

"Who reported enjoying the trailers more? The people who were told the selection was randomly picked from a big pile, rather than carefully curated from a short list. Why? The random trailer felt serendipitous, as if someone had gotten a lucky surprise."

"But if they don’t like what they stumble upon, then the serendipity doesn’t help."

"“The layperson takeaway is, when you know a lot about a product, you really do like to have a hand in that process, and enjoy it more by engaging,” Durante says. The point makes sense. If you know everything about skydiving equipment, then you probably want to pick out your next kit yourself, rather than have someone else randomly cobble together your flight suit."

Read: 2021-08-08 00:38

[hungching1982]

Response to Bruno Latour’s “Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts” – Have bun, will travel

https://lisaclevesque.wordpress.com/2015/05/28/response-1-bruno-latour/

"Latour describes the genesis of the automatic door to illustrate what kind of labour each element does, eliminating human work in the process."

"According to ANT, relationships between nonhumans and humans form a complex web: we shift work to them and they require work from us, we delegate to them, and they delegate to us right back."

"As Latour writes: “Prescription is the moral and ethical dimension of mechanisms. In spite of the constant weeping of moralists, no human is as relentlessly moral as a machine…the sum of morality does not remain stable but increases enormously with the population of nonhumans.” (157)."

Read: 2021-05-28 02:44

[hungching1982]

Why is Left-Wing Writing Often So Bad?

https://areomagazine.com/2021/03/24/why-is-left-wing-writing-often-so-bad/

"As Thomas Piketty points out, one of the motivators behind the recent surge in right wing populism—itself a distinctly postmodern phenomenon—was a sense that that the left has cut itself off from its humble working class roots and evolved in a Brahminesque direction, spouting impenetrable wisdom about vaguely radical change on behalf of marginalized people in prose that requires ten solid years at graduate school to understand."

"When people criticize left-wing writing, their target is usually critical theory: a hotly debated approach to analysing social phenomena through a variety of disciplinary lenses. A lot of critical theory is written in such a (apparently) hyper-precise manner that it can neither be clear or simple."

"Often, the accusation is that progressive intellectuals are simply pretentious and deliberately obscurantist. But there are more obvious institutional and economic reasons for this."

"Part of the problem lies in the academic roots of a lot of left-wing intellectual life. Academic writing is intended to be read by specialists, who ultimately dictate the author’s professional future. This suggests that an academic shouldn’t waste time writing for a broader audience who, however appreciative, are unlikely to cite her work in a Harvard Law Review article anytime soon."

"To improve left-wing writing will require two changes. First, we should foreground better literary role models."

"Second, we need to stop venerating academic aesthetics and the kind of high intellectualism associated with it."

Read: 2021-05-13 03:34

[hungching1982]

Shin Godzilla Captured the Terror of the Original, Six Decades Later - Paste

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/shin-godzilla-horror-original/

"Shin Godzilla is Anno and Higuchi’s interpretation of Honda’s original film, but with a modern twist that includes a scathing look at the continued incompetence of an unnecessarily complex bureaucracy, the first-person perspectives of those on the ground and a horrifying reimagining of Godzilla himself."

"There is no hope, only temporary solutions."

"The terror inflicted by Godzilla in this film triples as he undergoes three evolutions, each more destructive than the last. He is able to quickly adapt to his surroundings, going from a bumbling creature with only back legs to a gargantuan monster with atomic breath and the ability to asexually reproduce."

"Godzilla is virtually indestructible and cannot be killed like the 1954 version. While he is frozen with liquid coagulant, this is only a temporary solution. Even worse, humanoid creatures are frozen mid-spawn from his tail"

"While 1954’s Godzilla is about a force of nature, Shin Godzilla is about bureaucratic reactions to that force of nature."

"But this horror isn’t just created by the lizard deity. Perhaps even more horrifying than Godzilla is the bureaucracy that bogs down any hope of rapid response from the government."

"While both 2014’s Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters are more recent adaptations of the monster, they still do not capture that same fear, as neither take risks with their creature: He is not made to be a destructive, hateful god but one that wants to be a protector. In that context, despite being a gigantic kaiju imbued with nuclear energy, he does not want to wipe out humanity—unlike both his 1954 and 2016 counterparts, who were purely focused on destruction and reclaiming the Earth as their own."

Read: 2021-05-01 22:04

[hungching1982]

Godzilla and Postwar Japan

https://www.international.ucla.edu/israel/article/24850

"Kim Jong-Il is . . . a big film buff and apparently a world-class fan of Godzilla, to the extent that he commissioned his own giant monster film, entitled Pulgasari, in 1985"

"the Godzilla films can provide us valuable insights into Japanese culture since World War II."

"In 1952, the U.S. move King Kong was re-released in Japan, followed in 1953 by the Warner Brothers film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms."

"In March 1954, a Japanese fishing vessel, Daigo Fukuruyu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5) strayed into the U.S. nuclear bomb testing zone near Biniki Atoll. The crew was exposed to "massive amounts of radiation, one crew member died (after a cynical American cover-up), and some of the irradiated tuna on the ship made it onto the market in Japan. . . . This was big news in Japan (and was called 'the latest atomic bombing of Japan' in the media), especially, of course, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained fresh memories."

"Toho Studios invested a lot in Godzilla -- 60 million yen, about three times the budget of the average Japanese film at the time"

"The American version of the movie -- Godzilla, Kind of the Monsters -- opened in the U.S. in 1956."

"Tsutsui explained that this "was a cleverly re-edited version of the Japanese original with the unfortunate addition of Raymond Burr as a voyeuristic American reporter who witnesses the destruction of Tokyo."

"This version was considerably altered from the original Japanese film -- notably in that all references to World War II and the atomic bombs were removed."

"Professor Tsutsui pointed out that no less than twenty-eight Godzilla movies have been made by Toho, fifteen of which appeared between 1954 and 1975 ("at which point the series petered out")."

"By the 1980s and 1990s, the movies "were intended to be more serious and take Godzilla back for adults. They generally boasted better special effects . . . as well as better overall production values, but most scripts were still weak and the acting was astonishingly poor at some points."

"The first Godzilla film clearly had a strong anti-nuclear message. . . . Yet it becomes increasingly hard to conclude that the films have had a consistent message over time . . . . The only constant about the Godzilla films is a deep ambivalence, a kind of moral and intellectual ambiguity, that precludes drawing any firm, unitary conclusions."

"The message of Godzilla," Tsutsui explained, ". . . is complex and reflects . . . a fundamental ambivalence on the part of the Japanese when they look at issues like modernity, technology, science, nature, politics, and the world outside Japan.""

"Godzilla is portrayed, from the original 1954 feature on, as an unpredictable and uncontrollable force of nature, much like the earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons, and tidal waves that batter a helpless Japan. Moreover, the Godzilla series also seems to reflect a sense of vulnerability to international political and economic forces beyond Japan's control -- the Cold War, the oil shocks of the 1970s, protectionism, Japan bashing, and so forth.""

""The movies consistently underline the weakness of traditional authority figures in times of crisis. . . At the same time," Tsutsui remarked, "the films actually have a much darker subtext and . . . their message is actually rather conservative, even reactionary.""

Read: 2021-05-01 20:34

[hungching1982]

The Abuses of Popper

https://aeon.co/essays/how-popperian-falsification-enabled-the-rise-of-neoliberalism

"Popper warned scientists that, while experimental testing might get you nearer and nearer to the truth of your hypothesis via corroboration, you cannot and must not ever proclaim yourself correct."

"Making such a connection – between the hidden hand of nature and the apparently impartial decisions of the market – was a hot way to read Popper. His greatest fans outside the scientific community were, in fact, economists. At the London School of Economics, Popper was close to the neoliberal theorist Friedrich Hayek. He also taught the soon-to-be billionaire George Soros, who named his Open Society Foundations (formerly, the Open Society Institute) after Popper’s most famous book"

"The process of science, wrote Popper, was to conjecture a hypothesis and then attempt to falsify it. You must set up an experiment to try to prove your hypothesis wrong. If it is disproved, you must renounce it. Herein, said Popper, lies the great distinction between science and pseudoscience: the latter will try to protect itself from disproof by massaging its theory. But in science it is all or nothing, do or die."

"Science and politics were connected, but not in the way that the socialists claimed. Rather, science was a special example of the general liberal virtues that can be cultivated only in the absence of tyranny."

"Science is profoundly altered when considered analogous to the open market. The notion that scientific theories vie with one another in open competition overlooks the fact that research ambitions and funding choices are shaped by both big-p and small-p politics."

"That dream backfired. The notion that science is all about falsification has done incalculable damage not just to science but to human wellbeing. It has normalised distrust as the default condition for knowledge-making, while setting an unreachable and unrealistic standard for the scientific enterprise."

Read: 2021-04-16 22:43

[hungching1982]

The Big Shift Last Time: From Horse Dung to Car Smog | The Tyee

http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/03/06/Horse-Dung-Big-Shift/

"The horse, one of the most remarkable prime movers on the planet, pretty much ruled 19th century urban life and rural culture in both Europe and North America."

"Robert Thurston, a U.S. steam engine expert, opined in 1894, no less, that horses are not only "self-feeding, self-controlling, self-maintaining and self-reproducing, but they are far more economical in the energy they are able to develop from a given weight of fuel material, than any other existing form of motor.""

"But as horses industrialized cities and mechanized agriculture (they pulled all sorts of mowing, harvesting and plowing machines) their scale (along with rising immigrant populations) created a variety of social challenges."

"The automobile also replaced a fairly diverse transport system with a highly centralized one dominated by big carmakers and Big Oil companies. This concentration, in turn, fed the growth of big government to help build roads to accommodate more cars."

Read: 2021-03-27 01:43

[hungching1982]

Why Your Car Isn’t Electric (Published 2012)

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/magazine/why-your-car-isnt-electric.html

"In 1900, 34 percent of cars in New York, Boston and Chicago were powered by electric motors."

"The easiest assumption is that some powerful entity suppresses one technology and favors another, and so the wheel of progress slowly turns. But historians of science and business will tell you that this isn’t the whole story. Instead, the culture we live in and the technologies we use are constantly shaping and being shaped by one another, and it’s this messy and unpredictable process that determines winners and losers."

"At the turn of the 20th century, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest carmaker in the United States. It was also the biggest owner of cars in the country. That’s because the E.V.C. opted to rent or lease its vehicles instead of selling them."

"Society shapes the development and use of technology (this is a function of social determinism; for example, cars didn’t really become ubiquitous until they became easy to operate and cheap to buy), but technology also shapes society (technological determinism; think of the way cars then essentially created the suburbs)."

"You can change the technology. You can change the infrastructure and culture. And sometimes, you have to change both, easing people into accepting a new tool by making it look and feel like the old one you want to replace."

"If you’ve ever ridden in a Prius, you may have noticed that it creeps forward when you take your foot off the brake. There’s no technological reason it should do that; engineers just added the feature for the sake of familiarity."

Read: 2021-02-24 14:29

[hungching1982]

Everyone’s Talking about Ethics in AI. Here’s What They’re Missing

https://www.fastcompany.com/90356295/the-rush-toward-ethical-ai-is-leaving-many-of-us-behind

"The result is that AI will benefit some of us far more than others, depending upon who we are, our gender and ethnic identities, how much income or power we have, where we are in the world, and what we want to do."

"However, not all ethics guidelines are developed equally—or ethically. Often, these efforts fail to recognize the cultural and social differences that underlie our everyday decision making, and make general assumptions about both what a “human” and “ethical human behavior” is"

"Two phenomena in particular may be contributing to this problem. The first is that computer science and engineering, in industry and in education, have developed their processes around the concept of what is often referred to as “first principles,” building blocks that can be accepted as true, basic, and foundational in classical Western philosophy."

"In cultivating “first principles” around AI ethics, however, we end up with a fairly limited version of the “human.” The resultant ethics, derived from these centuries-old contexts in early Western human history, lack the diversity in education, culture, ethnicity and gender found in today’s complex world."

"In training technology students on ethics, institutions are mostly taking a Silicon Valley approach to AI ethics by employing a singular cultural frame that reinforces older, white, male, Western perspectives deployed to influence younger, male minds."

"That means that truly ethical AI systems will also need to dynamically adapt to how we change. Consider that the ethics of how women are treated in certain geographical regions has changed as cultural mores have changed."

Read: 2021-02-22 15:14

[hungching1982]

A Modest Defence of Postmodernism

https://areomagazine.com/2021/01/05/a-modest-defence-of-postmodernism/

"Noam Chomsky has often argued that postmodernism provides a philosophical vehicle for individuals who want to dissociate themselves from what is happening around them. It has generated its own lingo, favoured by the radical intelligentsia. Radical thinking is not bad in itself, but extreme dogmatism is extremely insalubrious."

"Postmodernism repudiates empiricism, foundationalism, metanarratives, objectivity, universal claims and biological determinism in favour of relativism and social constructionism."

"Postmodernism serves an important role in many fields of intellectual, political and social discourse and in activism. It drives research and movements that strive for a more accepting and diverse social ecosystem. Though much of its evidence is shoddy, it encourages individuals to think critically, inquisitively, inventively, innovatively and creatively. Radical thinking of this kind often forces sciences and even mathematics to be self-correcting."

Read: 2021-02-18 08:55

[hungching1982]

Jane Jacobs v. Robert Moses—the story is more surprising than you think

https://www.fastcompany.com/90583497/jane-jacobs-v-robert-moses-the-story-is-more-surprising-than-you-think

"It’s interesting to note that Jacobs didn’t argue against data per se, but rather against how data was typically collected and analyzed. She was interested in understanding how the social connections of place created certain ties that strengthened the urban economy."

"Moses has come to represent the technocratic planner whose main concern was making New York a “modern” city of highways and high-rises. Moses was able to deploy urban renewal strategies that effectively severed the community ties that Jacobs valued by using data as evidence, and also by producing the types of maps advocated by Bartholomew."

Read: 2021-02-18 01:38

[hungching1982]

GTFO: What "The Social Dilemma" Gets Right and Gets Wrong

https://areomagazine.com/2020/10/29/gtfo-what-the-social-dilemma-gets-right-and-gets-wrong/

"Mere moments in, the star of the film and the moral force behind it—tech activist and ethicist Tristan Harris, the 'conscience of Silicon Valley'—is seen receiving and compulsively responding to a text message, eyes aglow in the light of his iPhone screen. Later, it’s revealed that most of the film’s participants, despite what they know about the industry, admit to harboring significant social media addictions."

"None of these facts take away from the virtues of the film, but they do clarify its central contradiction: how do we fix something that we are intrinsically part of?"

"The film is most useful in depicting exactly how the platforms function and outlining their basic economic incentive structure, which Harris calls the attention economy."

"On social media, we are all semi-famous and yet more invisible to each other than ever before."

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one."

"Each medium of communication is its own metaphor and promotes a particular style of thinking. Oral presentations were once the primary means of public discourse, which encouraged a form of proverbial thinking that rewards tone, memory and storytelling ability."

"The early American colonies, by contrast, were a typographic culture. Reading cultures require methodical, linear thought and long attention spans."

"The pathological mindset underlying social media use has been described as FOMO (fear of missing out). But there’s more to it than that."

[hungching1982]

What If Privacy Matters Less Than We Think? - The Philosophical Salon

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/what-if-privacy-matters-less-than-we-think/

"Etymology suggests as much, Hannah Arendt argues. For the ancient Greeks, a 'life spent in the privacy of one's own (idion) outside the world of the common is 'idiotic' by definition.' A life immersed in 'one's own' is a life cut off, isolated, alienated, and alienating. The Greeks understood that 'privacy has a privative trait'; it meant to be 'deprived of something,' namely, what it is to be properly human."

"Alone and on our own, we are incomplete. That was what the ancient Greeks meant to say. We remain unfulfilled, unformed, and unrealized in a private existence."

"In the public realm, we become truly, uniquely human, because that is where we learn what it means to be free, active and impactful individuals, who exercise the power in and of a community."

"As the word ‘republic’ suggests, the public realm is the heart of politics, not individual privacy. When people learn what it means to be public creatures, when they learn how to negotiate and deliberate, which is often boisterous, contentious and unpleasant, they act the part of citizens. Privacy is not similarly instructive."

"But in history, unorthodox, cutting edge ideas rarely enjoy the luxury of privacy. Rather, they are conceived, articulated and sustained under constant pressure—or oppression. Concerted public organizing, by vibrant and powerful associations, keeps them alive and ensures that controversial ideas, like civil rights expansions, come to fruition. It is more accurate to think of privacy as the fruit of civic action and protest, not its precondition."

"Consider the case of China: though famous for its ‘Great Firewall’ suppressing disruptive speech and ideas online, researchers have been surprised to discover the regime is engaged in less censorship than previously thought."

"The Chinese government is content to allow and cultivate the atomization that occurs online, where citizens remain isolated and independent in their digital pods."

[hungching1982]

Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

"Jonathan Webber argues that 'as originally defined by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism is the ethical theory that we ought to treat the freedom at the core of human existence as intrinsically valuable and the foundation of all other values' (2018: 2)."

"On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—'mind' and 'body'—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of the universe."

"Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices."

"'Existentialism', therefore, may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence."

"According to Husserl, consciousness is our direct openness to the world, one that is governed categorially (normatively) rather than causally; that is, intentionality is not a property of the individual mind but the categorial framework in which mind and world become intelligible."

"Sartre's slogan—'existence precedes essence'—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself."

"The fundamental contribution of existential thought lies in the idea that one's identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to 'exist' is precisely to constitute such an identity. It is in light of this idea that key existential notions such as facticity, transcendence (project), alienation, and authenticity must be understood."

"But what matters for existential thought is the manner of such instantiation, the way of existing. What this means can be seen by contrasting human existence with the modes of being Heidegger terms the 'available' (or 'ready-to-hand', zuhanden) and the 'occurrent' (or 'present-at-hand', vorhanden)."

"An available or occurrent entity instantiates some property if that property is truly predicated of it."

"However, in contrast to the previous cases, the fact that natural and social properties can truly be predicated of human beings is not sufficient to determine what it is for me to be a human being."

"As Heidegger puts it, existence is 'care' (Sorge): to exist is not simply to be, but to be an issue for oneself."

"In this sense, human beings make themselves in situation: what I am cannot be separated from what I take myself to be."

"Existentialists tend to describe the perspective of engaged agency in terms of 'choice', and they are sometimes criticized for this. It may be—the argument runs—that I can be said to choose a course of action at the conclusion of a process of deliberation, but there seems to be no choice involved when, in the heat of the moment, I toss the useless pen aside in frustration."

"Because existence is co-constituted by facticity and transcendence, the self cannot be conceived as a Cartesian ego but is embodied being-in-the-world, a self-making in situation. It is through transcendence—or what the existentialists also refer to as my 'projects'—that the world is revealed, takes on meaning; but such projects are themselves factic or 'situated'—not the product of some antecedently constituted “person” or intelligible character but embedded in a world that is decidedly not my representation."

"What this means can perhaps be brought out by considering moral evaluations. In keeping my promise, I act in accord with duty; and if I keep it because it is my duty, I also act morally (according to Kant) because I am acting for the sake of duty. But existentially there is still a further evaluation to be made. My moral act is inauthentic if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, I do so because that is what 'one' does (what 'moral people' do)."

"But I can do the same thing authentically if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, acting this way is something I choose as my own, something to which, apart from its social sanction, I commit myself."

"Similarly, doing the right thing from a fixed and stable character—which virtue ethics considers a condition of the good—is not beyond the reach of existential evaluation: such character may simply be a product of my tendency to 'do what one does', including feeling 'the right way' about things and betaking myself in appropriate ways as one is expected to do."

"Thus the norm of authenticity refers to a kind of 'transparency' with regard to my situation, a recognition that I am a being who can be responsible for who I am. In choosing in light of this norm I can be said to recover myself from alienation, from my absorption in the anonymous “one-self” that characterizes me in my everyday engagement in the world."

"In value theory, existentialists tend to emphasize the conventionality or groundlessness of values, their 'ideality', the fact that they arise entirely through the projects of human beings against the background of an otherwise meaningless and indifferent world."

"From within that choice there is an answer about what I ought to do, but outside that choice there is none—why should I be respectable, law-abiding?—for it is only because some choice has been made that anything at all can appear as compelling, as making a claim on me."

"If the idea that values are without foundation in being can be understood as a form of nihilism, the existential response to this condition of the modern world is to point out that meaning, value, is not first of all a matter of contemplative theory but a consequence of engagement and commitment."

"Commitment—or 'engagement'—is thus ultimately the basis for an authentically meaningful life, that is, one that answers to the existential condition of being human and does not flee that condition by appeal to an abstract system of reason or divine will."

"However, because this freedom is always socially (and thereby historically) situated, it is equally unsurprising that their writings are greatly concerned with how our choices and commitments are concretely contextualized in terms of political struggles and historical reality."

"Foucault's embrace of a certain concept of freedom, and his exploration of the 'care of the self', recall debates within existentialism, as does Derrida's work on religion without God and his reflections on the concepts of death, choice, and responsibility."

Read: August 6, 2020 at 03:56PM