Journeys to Selfhood


Book Description

Taylor (humanities and religion, Williams College, Massachusetts) reconsiders the two philosophers based on the notion that all modern philosophy lies between the poles of their thought. He has added a new introduction to the 1980 original edition.




Selfhood


Book Description

SELFHOOD is a practical self-help book, designed to help people to recover their sense of self, be happier and more fulfilled. Readers will learn a great deal about themselves, others and life. Readers will discover what selfhood means, how closely selfhood is linked to emotional and mental wellbeing and mental illness, the components of selfhood, how selfhood is lost, the feature of low and high selfhood, and how to reclaim one's sense of selfhood.SELFHOOD contains many practical suggests and recommended actions, devised to enhance people's sense of self. It is simply not possible to feel good, to regularly experience emotional wellbeing and mental health if your level of selfhood is low. SELFHOOD is the first of Dr. Terry Lynch's Mental Wellness Book Series.




Practices of Selfhood


Book Description

Contemporary understanding of human subjectivity has come a long way since the Cartesian 'thinking thing' or Freud's view of the self struggling with its unconscious. We no longer think of ourselves as stable and indivisible units or combinations thereof - instead, we see the self as constantly reinvented and reorganised in interaction with others and with its social and cultural environments. But the world in which we live today is one of uncertainty where nothing can be taken for granted. Coping with change is a challenge but it also presents new opportunities. Uncertainty can be both liberating and oppressive. How does an individual understand her or his position in the world? Are we as human beings determined by our genetic heritage, social circumstances and cultural preferences, or are we free in our choices? How does selfhood emerge? Does it follow the same pattern of development in all people, all cultures, all ages? Or is it a socio-cultural construction that cannot be understood outside its historical context? Are the patterns of selfhood fundamentally changing in the present world? Does new technology allow us more autonomy or does it tempt us to give up the freedoms we have? These are the questions that Zygmunt Bauman and Rein Raud explore in their engaging and wide-ranging dialogue, combining their competences in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory to look at how selfhood is produced in social practice, through language, efforts of self-presentation and self-realisation as well as interaction with others. An indispensable text for understanding the complexities of selfhood in our contemporary liquid-modern world.




Sources of the Self


Book Description

In this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.




The Origins of Self


Book Description

The Origins of Self explores the role that selfhood plays in defining human society, and each human individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialisation and language, and the types of self we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Edwardes argues that other awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only non-model, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self.




Transcending Abuse & Betrayal - A Journey to Healing & Selfhood


Book Description

Conscious Choices, Conscious Life! Transcending Abuse & Betrayal is an inspirational book that celebrates the triumph of dignity, courage and self-empowerment over the brutality and denigration of abuse and betrayal. The book depicts the life experiences of four women, Stacy, Miriam, Tessa and Jasareen with much of the focus on Stacy's personal journey to healing and selfhood. By sharing the stories of healing and the transformational power of conscious choices and forgiveness, Sasha Samy hopes that others may garner the courage to confront and transcend their experiences. With poignant personal anecdotes, penetrating insights, psychological research and spiritual teachings, Samy integrates a practical and holistic approach to healing and transformation in her book. The book, which is divided into three parts, also discusses: What constitutes abuse and its effects Why the targeted do not leave their abusive partners What is lacking in dysfunctional relationships How our erroneous thoughts, attitudes and belief systems create self-sabotaging and self-destructive behavioral patterns Why shadow and inner works are essential to understanding the self Techniques and tools to embrace the healing process www.sashasamy.com







Her Quest for Self: a Journey


Book Description

To journey into the pages of this book is to journey into the colourful world of Chinese and Chinese-American culture, into slivers of history, into gender politics, into myth and, perhaps, even into ourselves. In the private struggles and triumphs of Pearl S. Bucks and Amy Tans women characters, in their quest to re-frame and re-define themselves and their lives, echo the universal experience of women in time and space: the stories of love and loss, the yearnings and heartaches, the joys and sorrows, the laughter and the tears and, above all, their quiet strength and resilience in the face of great odds and injustices that, more often than not, have marked the female experience through generations. The book will, no doubt, strike a chord in the hearts of the readers and offer a fascinating insight into the heart of a womans world and, what it is to be a woman. Pearl S. Buck and Amy Tan, the two authors revisited in this book, may both be described as writers who have, in their own ways, written about the lives of women. Through their work, they challenged patriarchal assumptions about women, by attempting to fashion a distinctive feminine voice that allows for the articulation of womens experiences in their own voices, and /or through the female perspective. This book takes a re-look at the women characters in select novels of these two writers, examining and analysing their experiences and subjectivities as they journey in quest of the self. Special attention is drawn to the role of stories/storytelling as a potent means of female expression and of bridging multifarious human divides. The urgency of reframing and reinterpreting popular myths as a way of critiquing and changing mindsets (where these need to be changed), is also explored in depth. The book is, therefore, a critical and insightful study of the works of two women that, although written in different periods, yet, intersect in these pages. The novels studied are those relating specifically to China and the Chinese/Chinese-American experience, the main subject being the Chinese woman, both in her own local space as well as outside of it. Storytelling enables the transmission and perpetuation of values, culture and history which, [as depicted here], are crucial to self-knowledge, and to an understanding of ones place and identity in the universe . The self that is represented in these novels [therefore], is not a self in isolation, but a self that is a part and parcel of the human tapestry where race, gender, culture and history meet and intersect.




Postmodern Theology


Book Description

Postmodern Theology consists in a sharp-edged retrospective and reflection on the forty-year history of the most important movement in contemporary religious thought that is only now passing from the scene. The author, Dr. Carl Raschke, is generally credited with having sparked the movement, even if he did not always happen to be its leading spokesperson. Not only has a comprehensive survey of postmodern theology in all its different phases and complexity not been published prior to the appearance of this book, but it is even more remarkable for someone who both “launched” it and had a central role in shepherding it along to offer what may be termed a “movement memoir.” Postmodern Theology surveys and summarizes the major figures and trends that have given currency to such familiar expressions as “deconstruction,” “deconstructive theology,” “radical theology,” “a/theology,” “God is dead,” and of course, “postmodernism” itself. Dr. Raschke also contextualizes the emergence of these catchy phrases from a frothy soup of new intellectual theories and philosophical innovations, which were international in scope but customized for both academic and popular religious writers—mainly in Britain and America—from the late 1960s onward.




Journeys of Transformation


Book Description

Western Buddhist travel narratives are autobiographical accounts of a journey to a Buddhist culture. Dozens of such narratives have since the 1970s describe treks in Tibet, periods of residence in a Zen monastery, pilgrimages to Buddhist sites and teachers, and other Asian odysseys. The best known of these works is Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard; further reflections emerge from thirty writers including John Blofeld, Jan Van de Wetering, Thomas Merton, Oliver Statler, Robert Thurman, Gretel Ehrlich, and Bill Porter. The Buddhist concept of 'no-self' helps these authors interpret certain pivotal experiences of 'unselfing' and is also a catalyst that provokes and enables such events. The writers' spiritual memoirs describe how their journeys brought about a new understanding of Buddhist enlightenment and so transformed their lives. Showing how travel can elicit self-transformation, this book is a compelling exploration of the journeys and religious changes of both individuals and Buddhism itself.