ellauri082.html on line 105: Despite his flaws, DFW’s death is still a great tragedy, not because people are without their god of post-post-post-postmodernism, but because his redemptive and humanistic work is now decidedly finite. Well here sure was a humanist as far as technology is concerned. His work could have beeen made infinite by adding to the end: Poles are stupid, please turn over.
ellauri146.html on line 400: One of the outstanding features of the Romantic era in France was the re-evaluation of the feminine. It was widely assumed that man's capacity for rational thought and scientific achievement needed to be tempered by woman's capacity for sentiment. Indeed, the beneficial influence of woman's love and compassion was considered a necessary precondition to moral development, both for the individual and for all mankind. Woman thus had redemptive qualities (cash value). Perhaps the purest expression of this constellation of ideas is to be found in the utopian religious sects of the period and in the Romantic epic. Alfred de Vigny's Eloa (1824) may be read in this context. Eloa is the first of a series of angel women appearing in the Romantic epic. She is followed by Rachel in Edgar Quinet's Ahasvérus (1833), Sémida in Alexandre Soumet's La Divine Epopée (1840), Marie in Alphonse Constant's La Mère de Dieu (1844) and Liberté in Victor Hugo's La Fin de Satan (fragments written in 1854 and 1859, published posthumously in 1886). The mission of these quasi-divine female figures is to help put an end to evil.
ellauri155.html on line 787: Calvin even demonstrated his commitment to this truth in his placement of his teaching on predestination in The Institutes. In the final edition, he moved his section on predestination from the beginning of his work to a place following his teaching on redemption, in effect suggesting “that predestination is a doctrine best understood by believers after they come to know the redemptive work of Jesus Christ applied by the Holy Spirit.”
ellauri222.html on line 141: This notion that Bellow’s achievement as a novelist was redemptive of the form was a consistent theme in the reviews up through “Herzog.” So was the notion that his protagonists were representatives of the modern condition. After “Herzog,” those reactions largely disappeared. People stopped fretting about the death of the novel, and Bellow’s protagonists started being treated as what they always were, oddballs and cranks. But the critical reception of Bellow’s books in the first half of his career funded his reputation. It cashed out, ultimately, in the Nobel Prize. Nobels are awarded to writers who are judged to have universalized the marginal.
xxx/ellauri312.html on line 548: Rorty defines redemptive truth as "a set of beliefs that would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves". A hand job, that is what I need. While science offers us ‘‘an edifying example of tolerant conversability’’ or of ideal social cooperation, it remains an impoverished resource for self-flourishing. Kukoistus, hei täältäkö Eski Saarinen sen otti? Rortylta? No hmmm, se on kyllä positiivisen psykologian avainsanoja.
xxx/ellauri312.html on line 610: Rorty narrates that the West’s first redemptive principle was man’s relationship with God, the guarantor of universal truth, meaning, and salvation. God was eventually dethroned by the Truth of philosophy, as heralded by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Truth’s goal was to decipher reality’s blueprint. At present, the truth is being nudged over by the Imagination. The modern imagination aspires to enlarge our acquaintance with humanity and enrich ethical relations. Rorty argues that a culture of imagination can serve the redemptive purposes previously ministered by religion and truth, only in a manner more suited to a liberal, secular context. He calls this a literary culture, a culture where meaningful human relationships are ‘‘mediated by human artifacts such as books and buildings, paintings and songs’’ (TRR, p. 478). For Rorty, the literary culture may successfully usher a new world motivated by the ideal of human solidarity.
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