This paper explore ideas of ‘livingness’ in education and in research, through ideas of spirituality, conversation, care and curiosity. Research ‘on’ education is distinguished from educational research, with the latter having a transformative intention, and this can overcome some of the dualisms that have become embedded in education policy and practice. Research that is surprising has this in common with dialogue, in Buber’s terms, and with transformative education. And the care for the object of study that researchers may exhibit (...) is related to mutual care in all ethical relationships. This is an appropriate guide to curiosity. One example of such curious research is the use of conversation, conversation that is more dialogic than dialectical. In such ways, education and research can together be more ‘alive’, as can we all. (shrink)

Philosophy’s essence depicted by Socrates lies in its role as pedagogy for living, yet its traditional treatment of ‘body’ as a hindrance to ‘knowledge’ in fact severs it from life, transforming it into ‘an escape from life’.The philosophy/life dichotomy is thus an inherent flaw preventing philosophy as traditionally taught and engaged in, from fulfilling its original goal. Recent rejections of the Cartesian nature of Western curriculum, such as O’Loughlin’s ‘Embodiment and Education: Exploring creatural existence’, constitute an important theoretical paradigm shift, (...) yet still fail to translate to substantial pedagogies which explore the ‘body’ and its relation to ‘mind’ directly. This article suggests a reorientation of philosophy teaching from its present disembodied pedagogy, towards an embodied-lived-philosophicalpractice. By the description and exemplification of modern postural yoga I will depict the twofold role of the ‘body’ in philosophy teaching: 1) The ‘body’ as pedagogical vehicle serving the emergence of philosophical discourse, and 2) The body as yielding livingness to mean embodied-lived-philosophy as opposed to disembodied-lofty-philosophical escape from life. It will thus be suggested that yoga be incorporated as an integral part of philosophy teaching reclaiming its educational ethos. (shrink)

This essay approaches the “God is dead” theme by offering a new philosophical history addressing what would make belief in divinity, in God, sustainable and unsustainable. I claim that the death of nature and the death of God in the modern era are manifestations of a progressive distancing from a religious philosophy of the Earth that guided human development until the beginnings of civilization. I outline within the space limitations here a new way of looking at the rise of civilization (...) and the modern era by re-evaluating large-scale epochal beliefs and assumptions of progress within a context of sustainable ends and what I have termed sustainable wisdom. From an original evolved out-look I call animate mind, rooted in a religious philosophy of the living Earth, succeeding contractions of anthropocentric mind and machine-centric mind have regressively disconnected from the community of life. This trajectory courses the disconnect from the livingness of things as defining cosmos, to that of machine-centric mind in the modern era, a devolutionary elevation of the feelingless machine, of deadness, of what Erich Fromm described as cultural necrophilia. I propose rebalancing these later contractions of anthropocentric and machine-centric mind with that deeper reality of animate mind, forged as the human evolutionary legacy still present in the human body-mind today. The renewed legacy of animate mind provides a key to what a sustainable God might mean. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Techniques of the Self:Nourishing Life as Art of LivingLi Manhua (bio)Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life. By Eric S. Nelson. London and New York: Routledge, 2021.This essay proposes an account of the techniques of the self in early Daoism in light of Eric S. Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Routledge, 2021). It argues that the techniques of the self involved in nourishing life (yangsheng 養生) are indispensable (...) to the creation of the interdependent human-nature rapport that Nelson considers. Such interdependence does not require a moralistic stance that negates the self or forsakes individual desires in the cause of the environment—as in some of the existing Western ecological discourse—but a new form of self-relation involving the practice of a set of techniques of the self that relates the human to the non-human. The present contribution begins by arguing that the practice of nourishing life entails a series of bodily and spiritual techniques (shu 術) of the self, with the example of Cook Ding. This is followed by my exposition of different categories of such techniques, and why the techniques of nourishing the spirit (shen 神) are prioritized over those of the preservation of the bodily form (xing 形). Finally, I extend my discussion on the specific techniques of nourishing the spirit with regard to his chapter "Emptying Ecology," where Nelson argues that undoing fixations of the self and being responsive (ying 應) to things are attainable through deconstructive, skeptical, and paradoxical communicative strategies (p. 80).To start with, Nelson regards nourishing life as a way of living and speaking that goes beyond the binary opposition or a hierarchical relation between the human and other forms of life in some Western ecological philosophies:In the current crisis conditions, it appears that humans need every motivating ecology available whether it be light or dark green, anthro- or bio-centric, shallow or deep. All of these contending discourses are equalized in a Daoist ecology of shifting perspectives and ways of speaking. A benefit of dao-centric models—that as inflections of the "way" encompass and extend beyond notions of "bios" (specific life) and "zōe" (life in general)—is that they contest the binary oppositions and stratified hierarchies that have dominated recent Western environmental discourses: anthropocentrism/biocentrism, and humanism/posthumanism [End Page 762] (although the latter finds biocentrism still too anthropocentric in positing the very distinction between them).(p. 31, my emphasis)In other words, a non-hierarchical and non-opposing rapport between the human and the non-human lies in a practice of changing perspectives and, more concretely and importantly, adjusting communicative ways. Such a way of perceiving and speaking beyond boundaries between the individual and the general forms of life (sheng 生) is epitomized by the practice of nourishing life of Cook Ding in the third chapter of the Zhuangzi 庄子, titled "The Master of Nourishing Life" (Yangsheng zhu 養生主). When Ding—Lord Wenhui's chef—cuts up an ox, he avoids violent and forced slaughter, slitting through the tender parts of the animal without touching any bone. As such, by concentrating only on the intestines of the ox, his movement is so agile that the knife produces a musical rhythm.More precisely, Nelson regards the example of Ding as "a cultivated and practiced process in which nature can come to be itself" (p. 36). In the context of the Zhuangzi, nature (tian 天) as an extension of the Dao goes beyond the "one-and-many" anthropocentric paradigm wherein humans have exclusive knowledge of the One, namely the unifying principle of reality (Chai 2018, p. 265). In this sense, specific life forms, bios, are undifferentiated from the wholeness of the One in the generic life, zōe. In other words, as the root of all life lies in Dao in terms of the onto-cosmological attunement of nothingness (wuwei 無為), our bodies (shen 身) mirror Heaven or Nature (tian 天) and the Earth (di 地) in the way they attune to the flow of vital energetic dynamics, responding to the myriad things and Heaven and Earth in an organic totality. This is manifest in Ding, as he nourishes life by turning his daily activity into a practice of encountering non-human life forms... (shrink)

Salsa dancing, a partnered dance premised on the felt sense of connection, is well suited to an exploration of Henry’s radical phenomenology of immanence and Heidegger’s facticity of life. Birthed in social celebratory contexts, salsa carries a particular motile freedom. What matters most is not how the dance movements are created from an outer frame of reference, but the experience of interactive responsiveness that emerges from unanticipated acts of giving life to another. Connecting to one’s partner and exuding a presence (...) filled with life is revealed in an indepth interview with two-time world champion salsa dancer, judge, choreographer and coach, Anya Katsevman. This interview attempts to invoke the kinetic, kinesthetic and affective registers of the lividness and livingness of salsa dancing. As a phenomenological inquiry into factical life, the inter-view is presented not so much as a matter of shared perspectives or viewpoints, but more in the way of an inter-feeling, a practice of life engagement. This affectively-oriented approach provides both promise and challenge to the field of phenomenology. It invites us to delve more deeply into feeling acts of seeing. It also helps us understand how, through attending more fully to acts of seeing, we can increase the intensity with which we feel the upsurge of life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Changed Life: Becoming True to Who I amJay Kyle PetersenI was born intersex in 1952 in the county hospital of a very small, ultraconservative town in rural Southwestern Minnesota. My biological parents and paternal grandparents raised me on a small family farm nearby. I knew by age four I was a boy. No one told me. There was nothing to decide. I have always known I am male. (...) My parents never discussed my unusual condition with me and died having never accepted me. They denied my true identity and instead chose to give me a girl’s name and raise me as a girl.My paternal grandmother knew I was different. She lived on the farm with us and, as she explained to me later on in life, changed my diapers and helped take care of me as an infant and toddler. She also was a Certified Nurse’s Aide in the pediatric ward of the county hospital where I was born and could see that anatomically I was different from other infants. She remained my lifelong ally and friend until her death in 1993. She and Grandpa provided an oasis in their farmhouse where I felt accepted. I felt relaxed and comfortable in their company, and could just be myself. Grandpa took me fishing. Grandma drove me to 4–H State Fair demonstrations and supported me in the audience for which she had helped prepare me. My grandmother taught me good humor, excellence and how it was okay to make mistakes. Much later, in 1977, she drove four hours alone to Minneapolis in blizzard conditions to be my “concerned family person” during chemical dependency treatment, when my mother and dad refused and she also celebrated with me after my successful completion of the program. I loved her and she loved me and she showed it. With her I found refuge away from the pressure and abuse in our farmhouse.But my grandparents and parents did not show me affection physically. The only touch I felt from my family, except my paternal grandparents, was abusive including certain religious figures outside our family. Farm animals and pets provided warmth, love, acceptance, and companionship. I loved riding around the farm on the back of my pet pig, Lucy. Nature, especially trees, wild weather, and local lakes provided rest for my stretched, weary nerves and stimulation for my imagination. There was something about the vivid and contrasting colors, even the sounds and livingness about it all—rich deep moist greens, clean pure vast open blues, dark warm earth which I laid upon and felt in my hands. These and the soothing sounds of the wind gently moving through tree leaves and corn leaves and the lake water lapping calmly upon sandy shores, as Grandpa cast out his line: all this I found both relaxing and energizing and allowed for me the safety and environment to rest, let go and expand so my natural inclinations to express myself creatively could open up. Otherwise, I had a very lonely, frustrated, painful, humiliating childhood and adolescence filled with mounting anger and a sense of futility because I could not be or express my real male self—including my attraction to girls.The cultural and religious pressure I felt, the increased abuse and social lies I was forced to live with—including being forced to wear girls’ clothing against my will—became unbearable. I sought [End Page 106] refuge in addiction early on—food for comfort, nicotine for mood alteration, alcohol given to me by my dad, and more. I became suicidal, and remained for a long time terribly depressed.The geneticist I have consulted for the last four years says that physicians who examined me prior to my genital surgeries described my genitals as “male structures formed without enough testosterone,” rather than female structures formed in the presence of excess androgen. She told me that the features recorded in my medical records, and that she had observed, indicate androgen exposure in utero along with an inherited genetic condition such that she says my condition began at conception. I was born with XX karyotype and testing for usual causes for androgen excess with someone... (shrink)

Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, war, genetic engineering and fetal experimentation, environmental and animal rights--these topics inspire some of today's most heated public controversies. And it is fashionable to pursue these debates in terms of the negative query "Under what conditions may life be disregarded or terminated?" John Kleinig asks a different, more positive question: What may be said in behalf of life? Looking at the full range of appeals to life's value, he considers a variety of issues. Is livingness (...) as such to be affirmed and respected? Is there an ascending order of plant, animal, and human life? Does human life possess a distinctive claim, or must we discriminate between humans that do and humans that do not have claims on us? Kleinig shows that assertions about valuing life camouflage a complex normative vocabulary about worth, reverence, sanctity, dignity, respect, and rights. And "life," too, is subject to an assortment of understandings. Sensitive to the frameworks informing diverse appeals to life's value, this comprehensive work will interest readers concerned with the environment, animal rights, or bioethics. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)