Sartre,Developmental Psychology and Burgeoning Self-Awareness: Ricocheting from Being to Nothingness

While the genesis of self-awareness at approximately 18 months old is a dramatic landmark in human development, there is at this stage no explicit awareness on the toddler's part of his/her truly standing apart from others. Only much later does a distinct sense of self shift into focus, and here Sartre provides us with a compelling theory of a first reflective experience of self-awareness. He explains this phenomenon by emphasizing a violent shift in ontological status, one in which the pre-adolescent child is precipitated from functional unity with a primary caregiver to an individuated state involving self-awareness as privative, i.e. where the child becomes aware of existing only in the form of not-being-the-adult. For Sartre this new experience of self is not therefore positive but rather formal or empty; there has in fact been a psychic transition, from being to nothingness. In addition, Sartre also states that all children first explicitly experience themselves in this fashion. These claims find support in the work of developmental psychologist Margaret Mahler. In fact, in spite of the vast developmental discrepancies between toddler and pre-adolescent child, given the appropriate environmental triggers privative subjectivity will be shown to involve a regression to the much earlier rapprochement stage of development described by Mahler.     

Pain Sensitivity: An Unnatural History from 1800 to 1965

Who was truly capable of experiencing pain? In this article, I explore ideas about the distribution of bodily sensitivity in patients from the early nineteenth century to 1965 in Anglo-American societies. While certain patients were regarded as “truly hurting,” other patients’ distress could be disparaged or not even registered as being “real pain.” Such judgments had major effects on regimes of pain-alleviation. Indeed, it took until the late twentieth century for the routine underestimation of the sufferings of certain groups of people to be deemed scandalous. Often the categorizations were contradictory. For instance, the humble status of workers and immigrants meant that they were said to be insensitive to noxious stimuli; the profound inferiority of these same patients meant that they were especially likely to respond with “exaggerated” sensitivity. How did physicians hold such positions simultaneously? Pain-assignation claimed to be based on natural hierarchical schemas, but the great Chain of Feeling was more fluid than it seemed.     

邵雍体用论的渊源、特色与定位

体用论在邵雍哲学中占有重要的位置,是邵雍思想的特色所在。邵雍的体用论与哲学史上常见的内与外、基础与表现意义上的体用论颇有不同,代表了另外一种较为陌生的思想传统。此种体用论的直接来源是邵雍之父邵古的声音之学,体用概念是邵雍对声音之学特有的全用概念所作的哲学抽象。其更为久远的渊源则是发端于汉末曹魏之际的“形质论”的体用论传统。此种传统重在分析物理,与在佛教影响下形成的重在分析性理、空理与天理的“本体论”的体用论传统恰相对立。邵雍“观物”的哲学宗旨,与其“形质论”的取向内在相关。