Repository | Series | Buch | Kapitel
I and mine
pp. 85-96
Abstrakt
For centuries, one of the staples of Western thought has been a rather specific conception of what a human person is. On this conception, the person is understood, as Clifford Geertz has put it, as "a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background."1 Though Descartes was by no means the father of this conception of the human person, the self, the Cartesian cogito provided it with a powerful and influential articulation. In the wake of Descartes, Enlightenment thought in its various dresses has often exalted the self to quasi-divine status, or at least ascribed to it an angelic independence from the physical and cultural context in which it acts.
Publication details
Published in:
Dauenhauer Bernard (1991) Elements of responsible politics. Dordrecht, Springer.
Seiten: 85-96
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-3564-1_6
Referenz:
Dauenhauer Bernard (1991) I and mine, In: Elements of responsible politics, Dordrecht, Springer, 85–96.