In this essay, I argue that rather than rejecting narcissism, the most appropriate response to contemporary egoism and individualism is a revised understanding of narcissism, one that acknowledges the deeply social nature of our selves by seeking to understand the ways in which we exist as individuals through others. I will call this form of narcissism “vulnerable narcissism.” Once we recognize the extent to which we are, as individuals, constitutively social, narcissistic investments in oneself can be recognized as investments in particular social conditions that influence, sustain, or disadvantage us.

While recent work on trauma provides insight into the first-person experience of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Aristotelian propositional logic, which underlies Western paradigms of thought, contains implicit ontological assumptions about identity and time which obscure the lived experience of PTSD. Conversely, Indian Buddhist catuskoti logic calls into question dualistic and discursive forms of thought. This paper argues that catuskoti logic, informed by Buddhist ontology, is a more fitting logical framework when seeking to describe and understand the first-person experience of PTSD, as it allows for ambiguity, non-duality, and polysemy.

As a verbal art, the “specifica poetica ” of poetry is incontestably its peculiar rhythmic and sound patterning. Regarded as a ‘twin-sister’ of music, as it originally was meant to be sung, poetry offers a different experience of language and the world. Reciting a poem, reading it ‘aloud mentally’, or simply listening to someone else’s recitation is not a trifle experience. It may prove unsettlingly significant in the light of recent philosophical treatments, inscribed into Heidegger’s existential thought based on his multi-dimensional notion of temporality intrinsic in Being/Dasein, notably, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe and Jacques Derrida. In the present essay, I shall primarily focus on Nancy’s compelling conception of the act of listening which he expounds in his book Listening. Drawing upon a plethora of philosophers, such as, Heidegger, his friend Lacoue-Labarthe and others, Nancy elaborates a forceful understanding of the act of listening beyond the meaning-bound, message-focused one. With a challenging, rich philosophical verve, Nancy probes the experience of listening to music, (poetic) rhythm and even to mere human voices’ timbre and links it to our own awareness of our own subjectivity, as well as perceiving subjects engaging with the world surrounding us. Listening mirrors our own selves. It makes reverberate our silent, inner depths whose essence lies beyond the meaning-loaded constructs which define our existence. Being fundamentally temporal, the subject’s economy is perceived, from this temporally existential view, as governed by an unremitting mimetic deferral, continuity and inception, or in rhythm’s logic, repetition and spacing . Poetry, like music, sets (rhythmic, sound) expectations and is perceived as an experience of immanence. The act of listening to a poem being recited or simply ‘reading it aloud mentally’, echoes the subject’s very economy and the perpetual, inceptive deferral underlying its formation, while at the same time reinforces it. What Nancy calls “to listen with all its being” (35), is what Whitman seems to exhort his reader to perform in his exhilarating work Song of Myself to which I refer in the second part of the present essay.

Political philosophy (past and present) concerns itself with thematic, systematic interrogation of political ideas, structures, institutions, and practices. As such it privileges the authority of reason. But, the vision of the literary imagination likewise can and does contribute to human understanding and to imagining our common future. Ursula K. LeGuin is a master teacher of ethical politics in her award-winning novel The Dispossessed. Therein, the protagonist Shevek is presented as an edifying exemplar of “permanent revolution” in a uniquely “thinking mind.” His quest for solidarity of peoples is grounded on a possibility of authentic selfhood within his anarchist society. Considering the concept of authentic selfhood as discussed in philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Shevek’s character may be represented as an imaginary, yet “real,” example or profile of how authentic selfhood may be constituted. This is consistent with LeGuin’s intent in The Dispossessed.

This paper subjects Dan Brown’s most recent novel Origin to a philosophical reading. Origin is regarded as a literary window into contemporary technoscience, inviting us to explore its transformative momentum and disruptive impact, focusing on the cultural significance of artificial intelligence and computer science: on the way in which established world-views are challenged by the incessant wave of scientific discoveries made possible by super-computation. While initially focusing on the tension between science and religion, the novel’s attention gradually shifts to the increased dependence of human beings on smart technologies and artificial (or even “synthetic”) intelligence. Origin’s message, I will argue, reverberates with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which aims to outline a morphology of world civilizations. Although the novel starts with a series of oppositions, most notably between religion and science, the eventual tendency is towards convergence, synthesis and sublation, exemplified by Sagrada Família as a monumental symptom of this transition. Three instances of convergence will be highlighted, namely the convergence between science and religion, between humanity and technology and between the natural sciences and the humanities.