Presentation: Human as Individual

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Human as individual

Soul of Man Under Socialism / Oscar Wilde

  • The individual is at the center
  • Socialism/ communism/anarchy will make the individual able to fulfill their potential as an artist

Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown / Virginia Woolf

  • The individual is at the center
  • The ultimate goal of literature is to get at the soul of the character

Freud

  • Analyzing the individual endlessly
  • The smallest nuances in a person’s story and dream become the subject of exhaustive theses

A Noiseless Patient Spider
 / Walt Whitman, 1868


A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
 
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Communist Manifesto, Futurist Manifesto

  • The proletariat has a right to a good life as do the bourgeois; everyone is important equally
  • Futurist manifesto - a lot of chaos but also ageism and sexism - there are certain humans who are more important than others, but still man-centric
  • One of many social theories in which the individual knows firmly where he stands

Fear of the abyss on a cultural scale (wandering spider soul)

  • Anthropocentric view: historically scientists thought that the earth was the center of the universe
  • Copernicus suggested that the earth revolved around the sun
  • By the 19th century, it was clear that we weren’t the center of anything (Herschel – not center of the universe)
  • Psychology became a science to alleviate the anxiety that stemmed from the debunking of anthropocentrism 

Explaining the yearning - biology?

  • Our biology dictates that we compete with other individuals for a place on this earth
  • Starting with the competition of bacteria and archaea for resources
  • Now competition for money or infamy
  • The individual must distinguish himself at a basic level
  • Theologically, the individual is important - heaven or hell

The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Kern

  • Relativism - a plurality of opinions. The next rational step is to start questioning everything, and the realization that the fear cannot be quelled.

The future of the individual

  • There is no story that explains where we are in the universe
  • The biological story: we turned it into a story of the individual. We can turn it chaotic: some die, some survive; some fall in love and marry and make money; so what.
  • Closet humanists
  • Left with this big fear 
  • Where is the individual now?

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