Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly
    Unavailable
    Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly
    Unavailable
    Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly
    Ebook225 pages5 hours

    Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly

    By David S. Pacini

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly presents a genealogy and critique of the ideal of conscience in modern philosophical theology, particularly in the writings of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. It shows why the apparently emancipatory rejection of heteronomy compromised the ideal of self-legislated freedom. David Pacini argues that, despite its advocacy of the popular political value of common understanding, the modern religion of conscience has become the Achilles' heel of both Kantian and Freudian thought. It is doomed to succumb to its own fundamentally narcissistic or self-relating orientation. Avoiding the tenacious cliché that the luminaries of modern philosophy simply replaced God with the self, David Pacini argues that the modern religion of conscience emerges out of a far more radical kind of disenchantment, one in which both God and self are de-divinized. Bereft of divinity, the God of modernity becomes empty; the self of modernity, in its autonomy, becomes hopelessly tied to dissociation from origins and to loss of a world. Left only to itself, the conscientious individual has only the world it legitimates through self-relating. But given that any other world is inconceivable, the conscientious individual can never know whether its world is just or merely the expression of self-interest. Paradoxically, Pacini argues, the most formidable proponents of the modern religion of conscience share with their critics a common problem: the self-legislating self has become both indispensable and impossible within much of modern philosophy and theology. This unique and interdisciplinary interpretation of conscience makes an important contribution for scholars and students of modern philosophy, Christian theology, psychoanalytic theory, and literary criticism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFordham University Press
    Release dateDec 22, 2008
    ISBN9780823229642
    Unavailable
    Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly

    Related to Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Simply Phenomenal!

      Jul 14, 2022

      Hunt Emerson Knockabout Press 2022 Pb, 224pp, £22.99, ISBN 9780861662906 Even after working on FT for well over two decades, some things never, as they say, get old. One of those things is the arrival, every four weeks, of a new “Phenomenomix” strip

      8 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 10, 2023

      Reading the article ‘Here’s sick in your eye’ [FT431:50] reminded me of a book entitled We Are Electric by Sally Adee. In this we read that Alexander von Humboldt inserted a silver wire connected to a galvanic pile into his rectum from which he exper

      12 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Feb 10, 2022

      Body Language
      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 3, 2022

      When I read David Hambling’s article ‘Listening to the voice within’ [FT423:16], I became conscious that my ‘inner voice’ was reading the piece aloud in my mind. Obviously I’ve had this realisation before; I decided to ask my wife if she also had an

      10 min read

    • Article

      After Death We Go…?

      Nov 5, 2020

      A History of the Afterlife Bart D Ehrman Oneworld 2020 Hb, 352pp, £20, ISBN 9781786077202 Many Christians believe that their doctrines sprang fully-formed from the Jewish origins of Christianity. But if this were so, many beliefs would be very differ

      8 min read

    • Article

      “Critical Space” Is Shrinking But We Are Fighting Back

      Apr 25, 2024

      WHAT CRETIN SAID THAT NOBODY EVER erected a monument to a critic? (I’ll tell you: it was that lugubrious drunk Jean Sibelius). Actually, he could simply have added “at least, not in a good way”. It’s a monument made of vibrating air rather than marbl

      6 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Sep 10, 2020

      A possible case of identity theft (Noel Rooney, “The Man Who Would Be Q”, FT395:42-44) involves reclusive American chess genius, madman, and Fortean Times namesake Bobby Fischer (1943-2008), who certainly haunted a generation of chess players. Around

      18 min read

    • Article

      Mesmerising Installations

      Jun 20, 2022

      Mesmerising Installations
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 5, 2020

      Sadly, the wonderfully prescient quotation from Samuel Pepys [FT397:70], “A dram in exchange for the pox is an ill bargain indeed,” is not by the great diarist, but from a spoof Twitter account. (https://londonist.com/london/books-and-poetry/samuel-p

      13 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jun 15, 2023

      Fortean Times never fails to provide me with something to think about, but rarely as much as the assertion that mass panics like Havana syndrome and transdermal fentanyl overdoses have become “endemic and long term” [FT430:7]. I’d previously assumed

      12 min read

    • Article

      Brilliant Corners

      Aug 8, 2023

      Brilliant Corners
      11 min read

    • Article

      A Muddy Refuge

      Oct 8, 2020

      Lost and Found on the River Thames Lara Maiklem Bloomsbury 2020 Pb, 317pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781408889237 As children, nearly all of us have an instinct for curiosity and collecting. I still have a stone with a hole in it I found on Chesil beach as a thre

      9 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 4, 2021

      CONTACT US BY POST: PO BOX 1200, WHITSTABLE CT1 9RH, OR E-MAIL SIEVEKING@FORTEANTIMES.COM PLEASE PROVIDE US WITH YOUR POSTAL ADDRESS The correspondence about the Whispering Corner in Lytchett Maltravers, Dorset [FT410:73] brings to mind the experienc

      6 min read

    • Article

      Also Received

      Jan 28, 2021

      The true origin of a controversial medieval relic Ludo Noens Aspekt, 2019 PB, £16.95, 248pp, refs, index. ISBN 9789463385138 In April 1988, the Vatican allowed a small sample of the famous Shroud kept in Turin Cathedral to be cut and subjected to Car

      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Dec 14, 2021

      TWELVE CAESARS: Images of power from the ancient world to the modern By Mary Beard ISBN: 978-0691222363 Princeton University Press (2021) – $35.00 www.press.princeton.edu The Caesars of Rome continue to beguile us. What is perplexing is why the first

      5 min read

    • Article

      Classical Corner

      Jan 5, 2022

      Classical Corner
      4 min read

    • Article

      Animals In Illustration

      Feb 22, 2024

      Animals In Illustration
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Oct 20, 2021

      The Old Un’s Notes
      6 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Sep 7, 2023

      Bravo to David Hambling for his precise response to Barry Baldwin on climate change causes [FT434:14]. Are there any places online where we can find the sources he mentions, especially the satellite tracking of how much energy reaches us from the Sun

      9 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jan 5, 2023

      I enjoyed the article on “British Bigfeet” [FT425:30-36]. Coincidentally, I only became aware of Bigfoot in Britain about three weeks before the magazine came out. On a walk along the Leeds–Liverpool canal in the vicinity of Haigh Hall to the west of

      10 min read

    • Article

      Readers’ Letters

      Sep 20, 2023

      SIR: My mother, for one, was delighted that Gareth Neame chose Highclere Castle as the location for Downton Abbey (September issue). She was a teacher during the war, and her entire school was evacuated to Highclere. The awestruck reaction of a bunch

      6 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Oct 6, 2022

      The following report is from the Nuxalk people of British Columbia, formerly known as the Bella Coola: “An unpleasant habit of ghosts is the throwing of stones at the living. This is done partly from a love of mischief, and partly to remind their rel

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Sep 21, 2022

      The Old Un’s Notes
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy

      Nov 8, 2019

      “Tragedy is democracy turning itself into a spectacle,” and anyone with Twitter will concur with that observation of Critchley’s. The post The Greeks Aren’t Done with Us: Simon Critchley on Tragedy appeared first on The Millions.

      15 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Feb 23, 2023

      What a glorious start to 2023, with a long-awaited essay on a tome, beloved of so many children of the 1970s [FT427:28-35]. Billy Rough’s feature captured precisely the love we all have for Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain – arguably the finest

      10 min read

    • Article

      Man About Town

      Sep 30, 2021

      IN THRALL TO THE STONE-AGE superstition that we will drop down dead if we hear certain forbidden phonemes, society (“borne back ceaselessly into the past”) has now reached the next anthropological taboo, to wit, images: people skulk in terror past st

      4 min read

    • Article

      Classical Corner

      Sep 9, 2021

      Classical Corner
      4 min read

    • Article

      As Everybody Knows…

      Nov 4, 2021

      From Mozart’s Murder to Cleopatra’s Asp Graeme Donald Michael O’Mara 2021 Pb, 256pp, £7.99, ISBN 9781789293623 Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World Otto English Wellbeck 2021 Hb, 320pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781787396395 You wait all day for a scepti

      4 min read

    Reviews for Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words