The aim of this study was to understand how mothers experienced midwives' uncaring behaviour and actions during birth. Sixty-seven first-time mothers took part in the study, in which data were collected through interview. The interview text was analysed using hermeneutic text analysis. Nearly half of the mothers interviewed (n = 32) said that midwives did not care for them. The findings show that midwives' behaviour was humiliating when they ignored mothers and held them in contempt. The mothers felt further (...) humiliated when the midwives did not believe them, treated their bodies in a careless manner and tended to put blame on them. Through their behaviour and actions, some midwives have shown that they no longer have a caring attitude as an element of their professional practice and that they have ignored ethics by offending mothers' sense of dignity. (shrink)

A notable feature of post-Fordist economies is the increase in service jobs, which includes care occupations such as child care and elder care (Folbre 2001, 182). The commodification of caring activities raises issues surrounding the reception and dispensation of these services, and this is particularly salient to the focus of this paper, elder care. Because the demand for this type of care has greatly increased in recent decades (Glendinning, Schunk, and McLaughlin 1997; Kaye et al. 2006) and also in recognition (...) of the impact of caring activities on families, many countries have sought to initiate policies to provide state-funded services or to compensate family caregivers for their care work.1If help with the .. (shrink)

This paper examines the environment in which waged caregiving takes place. Because the activities of care have been predominantly performed by women in the home, a caring attitude is taken to be inherent to the persons who perform this labor. My analysis endeavors to clarify this misconception. Drawing on studies of paid caregivers who assist elderly individuals accomplish the tasks of self-care, I discuss how these workers face at least three layers of uncertainty. Paid caregiving takes place on a fragile (...) moral terrain, and I argue that the prevalent structure of paid care labor cannot acknowledge this, nor can it support caring within care labor. I use Claudia Card’s concept of gray areas to highlight the manner in which the structure of care labor inhibits the care worker from easily negotiating the moral terrain of caregiving. (shrink)

Background:The foundation of all nursing practice is respect for human rights, ethical value and human dignity. In perioperative practice, challenging situations appear quickly and operating theatre nurses must be able to make different ethical judgements. Sometimes they must choose against their own professional principles, and this creates ethical conflicts in themselves.Objectives:This study describes operating theatre nurses’ experiences of ethical value conflicts in perioperative practice.Research design:Qualitative design, narratives from 15 operating theatre nurses and hermeneutic text interpretation.Ethical consideration:The study followed ethical principles (...) in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration and approval was granted by the local university ethics committee.Findings:The result showed that value conflicts arose in perioperative practice when operating theatre nurses were prevented from being present in the perioperative nursing process, because of current habits in perioperative practice. The patient’s care became uncaring when health professionals did not see and listen to each other and when collaboration in the surgical team was not available for the patient’s best. This occurred when operating theatre nurses’ competence was not taken seriously and was ignored in patient care.Conclusion:Value conflicts arose when operating theatre nurses experienced that continuity of patient care was lacking. They experienced compassion with the patient but still had the will and ability to be there and take responsibility for the patient. This led to feelings of despair, powerlessness and of having a bad conscience which could lead to dissatisfaction, and even resignations. (shrink)

Wild animal reproduction poses an important moral problem for animal rights theorists. Many wild animals give birth to large numbers of uncared-for offspring, and thus child mortality rates are far higher in nature than they are among human beings. In light of this reproductive strategy – traditionally referred to as the ‘r-strategy’ – does concern for the interests of wild animals require us to intervene in nature? In this paper, I argue that animal rights theorists should embrace fallibility-constrained interventionism: the (...) view that intervention in nature is desirable but should be constrained by our ignorance of the inner workings of ecosystems. Though authors sometimes assume that large-scale intervention requires turning nature into an enormous zoo, I suggest an alternative. With sufficient research, a new form of gene editing called CRISPR promises to one day give us the capacity to intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties. (shrink)

Traditional Africans teach ubuntu principles of communality, mutual respect, caring and so forth, but they do not walk the talk with regard to the treatment of widows. In the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth, Christian communities preach unconditional love, especially for the poor, marginalised and vulnerable. Implementation is, however, grossly lacking in respect of the treatment of widows. There is thus an apparent deliberate uncaring, disrespectful, discriminatory, impolite and unjust treatment of widows in African communities in spite of the (...) ubuntu values and Christian teaching that emphasise love and caring, especially towards the grieving and thus vulnerable widows. Widows seem to be neglected and even oppressed in our time. The aim of this research is to critically examine African traditional widowhood rites and practices with special reference to the comfort or pain to which they subject African widows. The research further aims to examine the behaviour of some African Christians belonging to three congregations of one mainline church to determine whether their treatment of widows resonates with Jesus’ teaching regarding the requisite care of widows. The issue of widowhood in Africa, in terms of the apparent plight of these bereaved and grieving women, needs to be urgently addressed for change in the 21st century. A critical literature study of relevant sources and a newspaper article will be used for this research. My personal experiences and continuing observation as an insider will also inform the research in useful ways. (shrink)

Christopher Southgate recognizes that the natural world is both ambiguous, mixing goods and bads, and simultaneously dramatically creative, such creativity resulting from just this ambiguous challenge of environmental conductance and resistance. Life is lived in green pastures and in the valley of the shadow of death. Perhaps this is the only way God could have created the values found on Earth, by means of such disvalues, as a Darwinian natural selection account suggests. Generating Earth's biodiversity requires struggle, success, and failure—and (...) such an only way would constrain a powerful, loving God. But Southgate judges this too uncaring of suffering individuals, the products of evolution sacrificed to the systemic process. Perhaps God through Jesus redeems all the sacrificed individuals—pelicans in a pelican heaven—but redemption of all the bullfrogs and acorns becomes an incredible hope. Nature is a cruciform creation, where life persists in perpetual perishing. Life is forever conserved, regenerated, redeemed. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of minor or general psychotherapy championed by physicians seeking to popularise psychotherapy in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Understood as a set of skills and principles meant to guide behaviour towards and around patients, this form of psychotherapy was portrayed as indispensable for physicians of all specialities as well as for all personnel of medical institutions. This article shows how, as a result of Soviet teaching on the power of suggestion to influence human organisms, every interaction (...) with patients was conceptualised as a form of psychotherapy, leading to the embrace of placebo as a legitimate form of therapy, and to the blurring of the boundary between therapy and other activities in the clinic. The principles of minor psychotherapy reveal a concept of psychotherapy that is much wider, and rooted in different priorities, than the dominant understanding of this type of treatment found in Western Europe and North America. This article addresses the ethical principles implicit in the Soviet perspective, demonstrating that despite fighting against the uncaring and dismissive attitude of other physicians, Soviet psychotherapists remained rooted in the paternalistic tradition. Finally, it traces the efforts to establish minor psychotherapy as standard practice in medical institutions, which, like many other plans and ambitions of Soviet psychotherapists, were constrained by a lack of resources in the healthcare system. (shrink)

writings, however, reveals a profoundly medieval outlook. Smith is preoccupied with the need to preserve order in society. His scientific methodology emphasises reconciliation with the world we live in rather than investigation of it. He invokes a version of natural law in which the universe is a harmonious machine administered by a providential deity. Nobody is uncared for and, in real happiness, we are all substantially equal. No action is without its appropriate reward – in this life or the next. (...) The social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the ‘invisible hand’, that is, the hand of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised. (shrink)

The devotional literatures across the Hindu bhakti traditions of medieval India are shaped by distinctive styles of affective responses to the divine reality. A theme which recurs in several layers of their songs is a theological dialectic between divine majesty and divine accessibility; the divine is not only simply transcendent in the sense of being a distant deity but is also immanently present in and through a range of human sensitivities, emotions, and affectivities. We will highlight the dialectic in the (...) devotional songs of three medieval figures, Tulsīdās, Sūrdās, and Mādhavadeva, which are structured primarily by the devotional attitude of a servant towards the Lord. As we will see, this theological servitude is not to be understood as a form of abject servility, for the three poets, in their somewhat distinctive ways, can not only speak of the Lord as a friend and as a lover, but can even level various kinds of complaints, challenges, and accusations at the Lord. Thus, if the Lord’s transcendental sovereignty is emphasised by the devotee through the modes of self-censure, the Lord’s immanent availability is also highlighted through the protests that the devotee fervently makes to the seemingly uncaring Lord. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 26 (2006) 213-216 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byJohn Berthrong Boston University School of TheologyDialogues at One Inch Above the Ground: Reclamations of Belief in an Interreligious Age. By James W. Heisig. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003. 215 pp.Few scholars are better prepared than James W. Heisig to write about the current state of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and few have written more insightfully about the historical, theological, (...) religious, and spiritual factors that have made Buddhist-Christian dialogue so intriguing for the last four decades. Heisig is the director of the Nanzan Institute, one of the premier institutions in the world dedicated to cultivating dialogue primarily between Christians and Buddhists, but also with people of other traditions and no religious belief at all.The title of the book is taken from the writings of the famous medieval poet Saigyō, who said that he tried to live at "one inch above the ground." Heisig follows Saigyō's advice by focusing many of his articles on themes such as health and ecology rather than abstruse metaphysical discussions of the intricacies of Buddhist and Christian doctrines, although, as one would expect, he shows a deft hand at explaining the philosophical and theological dimensions of living life at one inch above the ground.The opening two chapters on how we can collectively view the current ecological crisis demonstrate Heisig's sure hand at moving between profound meditations on current events and demonstrating how these problems can be even better understood in terms of spiritual and religious insights. Heisig argues that having two eyes, one Buddhist and one Christian, might just help us walk better on the ground, especially a ground that is being harmed on a daily basis by human disregard for the natural environment. His essay on the interpretation of the Buddhist principle of sufficiency is based on the injunction that we should learn to "consider how much is enough." The following essay demonstrates how hard-headed he can be with his call for us not to move from an uncaring contempt for nature to an equally ill-conceived sentimentalization of nature.There are so many insightful and clever features to the essays in the book that it is hard to pick out any one essay for special comment, but one of my favorites, high-lighting [End Page 213] Heisig's rhetorical powers, is "Six Sūtras on Dialogue" (pp. 139–157). This essay demonstrates what a Christian theologian might learn from engaging in interreligious dialogue. Moreover, it even takes the form, as Heisig explains, of the traditional Buddhist sūtra of six teachings on the nature of dialogue. Dialogue, according to Heisig (echoing Alfred North Whitehead), "is an adventure of ideas" (p. 141). The first teaching is "The spirit of interreligious dialogue need not be born of traditions in order to be reborn there" (p. 145). One of the strong points Heisig makes over and over again is that we now live with increasing self-awareness in a religiously pluralistic world. Actually, we always have, though various theological traditions have been adept at either ignoring or rejecting the notion that there could be anything positive about religious pluralism. At its worst, pluralism simply demonstrated the spiritual depravity and turbidity of humankind, and at best, it could simply be ignored as unworthy of serious comment. With the growing social, political, economic, military, and cultural interconnections of the modern world, no one can ignore pluralism. Theologians and religious leaders, in particular, need to think about religious pluralism even if this dialogue is not something that was "born" within their traditional theological discourse.The second teaching is a corroloary of the first: "Dialogue is primarily a minority enterprise that stands free of the obligations of institutional religion" (p. 147). Now, the leaders of institutional religion might dispute this point, but again Heisig is correct in noting that people are going to talk to their neighbors regardless of what they are told to do by worried religious authorities. He makes the... (shrink)

On Saturday, August 26, 1893, thirteen-year-old Edith Low Babson was swimming in her favorite swimming hole on the Annisquam river in her home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Though she was a strong swimmer, something went wrong, and she drowned. A tragedy like all such. But this drowning had unusual consequences. Edith’s older brother was Roger W. Babson, who grew up to become one of America’s most prominent businessmen of the early twentieth century. A statistician, prolific author, philanthropist, founder of Babson (...) College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the Prohibition Patry’s Presidential candidate in 1940, Roger Babson was deeply affected by his sister’s death, as he was again many years later, in 1947, by the death of his grandson, Michael, who drowned while saving the life of a companion who had been knocked off of a sailboat in Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire. But Roger Babson was a man of action, not one quietly to acquiesce when confronted by suffering inflicted by a seemingly impersonal and uncaring nature. One year after his grandson’s death, Babson dedicated a significant part of his vast personal wealth to the establishment of the Gravity Research Foundation in New Boston, New Hampshire, which thereafter awarded an annual prize for theoretical research on gravitation, a prize whose winners include the likes of Stephen Hawking. Why? As Babson explained in a pamphlet published by the new foundation, “Gravity: Our Enemy Number One” (Babson 1948), the goal was to alleviate the suffering for which gravity was responsible, the gravity that seized his sister “like a dragon and.. (shrink)

It is taken for granted that power corrupts. This is reinforced culturally by everything from Machiavelli to contemporary politics. But how do we get power? And how does it change our behavior? So often, in spite of our best intentions, we lose our hard-won power. Enduring power comes from empathy and giving. Above all, power is given to us by other people. This is what all-too-often we forget, and what Dr. Keltner sets straight. This is the crux of the power (...) paradox: by fundamentally misunderstanding the behaviors that helped us to gain power in the first place we set ourselves up to fall from power. We can't retain power because we've never understood it correctly, until now. Power isn't the capacity to act in cruel and uncaring ways; it is the ability to do good for others, expressed in daily life, and itself a good a thing. Dr. Keltner lays out exactly--in twenty original "Power Principles"-- how to retain power, why power can be a demonstrably good thing, and the terrible consequences of letting those around us languish in powerlessness. (shrink)

Most political philosophers see rationally recognized human rights as justifying universal suffrage. But sentimentalism can develop its own justification for democracy. It is uncaring for rulers to deny people the vote out of a desire to retain power and privilege; and when rulers in Asia argue that Asian societies don’t need democracy because of the “natural deference” of Asian people, their argument is no more persuasive than patriarchal arguments for the natural deference of women. But a positive argument for (...) democracy emerges from Abraham Maslow’s idea that all humans have a deep desire for the esteem of others. Denying people the right to vote expresses a low opinion of them, and this goes deeply against our desire for esteem. Even though democratic societies may lose out on various economic opportunities because of the electorate’s unwillingness to make certain sacrifices, they provide a form of esteem that is for emotional reasons much more important to us humans. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly apparent that human embryo research has the very real potential to generate significant humanitarian benefits. Equally, it is clear that the destruction of embryos that such research inevitably involves is highly controversial within societies such as ours, where many hold either that from the moment of conception the embryo is morally considerable or that as a member of the human species it should not be treated as a mere means. How might we balance the potential humanitarian (...) benefits of embryo research against the various strongly felt moral objections to such use?In this rich and highly sophisticated work, Guenin argues for the experimental use of a bounded range of embryos, namely those which were intentionally produced for research ex utero and for which the progenitor has explicitly banned any intrauterine transfer. He argues that since they are not possible persons, it is morally permissible to perform experiments on this set of embryos .1 Indeed, he suggests that given the suffering that such research might relieve, it would be uncaring for us not to undertake it .As one might expect, the focus of the book is primarily on stem cell research. The ‘pluripotent’ stem cells one finds in …. (shrink)

Hiring international migrant eldercare workers to work hard for little pay simply because this traveling workforce needs wages higher than those they would receive back home seems somehow “wrong.” The standard justification for hiring migrants seems more like an excuse than a justification. My purpose in this article, however, is not to condemn people who hire international migrant eldercare workers, but to suggest that these employers as well as their employees are caught in the same moral bind. Depending on how (...) uncaring a state is about meeting its people’s fundamental needs including adequate long-term care, it will create a hostile environment for the development of caring people. But a society without a sufficient number of caring people risks unraveling. People who avoid care work and who shun the practice of care are, in my estimation, “marginal” to society in that they are not contributing to the foundation that makes society possible. (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews, I analyze how teen fathers talk about the responsibility for having a baby at a young age. In addition to negotiating the stigma often associated with teen pregnancy, teen fathers also confront stereotypes that label them as selfish and uncaring. In telling their stories of “what happened,” they utilize three gendered discourses to deny responsibility for the pregnancy: the feminization of birth control, a discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire, and love. Their narratives also reveal (...) the ways in which gendered norms can solve some problems while creating others. Aligning themselves with certain notions of masculinity can serve as a resource for denying responsibility for the pregnancy while also signifying their manhood, but these same discourses are also constraining in that they reinforce stereotypes of teen fathers as selfish, even predatory. While these approaches may allow teen fathers to claim masculine identities, they also stigmatize them as the wrong kind of men. In short, teen fathers are not only negotiating the potential stigma of teen pregnancy, they are also negotiating their identities as men. (shrink)

Health‐care and public sector institutions are high‐risk settings for workplace bullying. Despite growing acknowledgement of the scale and consequence of this pervasive problem, there has been little critical examination of the institutional power dynamics that enable bullying. In the aftermath of large‐scale failures in care standards in public sector healthcare institutions, which were characterised by managerial bullying, attention to the nexus between bullying, power and institutional failures is warranted. In this study, employing Foucault's framework of power, we illuminate bullying as (...) a feature of structures of power and knowledge in public sector institutions. Our analysis draws upon the experiences of a large sample (n = 3345) of workers in Australian public sector agencies – the type with which most nurses in the public setting will be familiar. In foregrounding these power dynamics, we provide further insight into how cultures that are antithetical to institutional missions can arise and seek to broaden the debate on the dynamics of care failures within public sector institutions. Understanding the practices of power in public sector institutions, particularly in the context of ongoing reform, has important implications for nursing. (shrink)

In the theater the fictional Dr. Kelekian’s relief that he does not have to talk to family members about his patient’s cancer treatment draws uneasy laughter from the audience. Doctors, patients, and family members alike recognize the situation, even if hearing it so baldly expressed discomfits them.Why do physicians and other health care professionals, including lawyers and bioethicists, so often view families as “trouble”? And why do families so often see medical professionals as uncaring and uncommunicative? Presumably everyone wants (...) the same goal—recovery or the best possible outcome for the patient. And yet trouble clearly exists. We do not see the problem as one of “dysfunctional families” or “callous doctors,” although there are undoubtedly many of each. (shrink)

In the theater the fictional Dr. Kelekian’s relief that he does not have to talk to family members about his patient’s cancer treatment draws uneasy laughter from the audience. Doctors, patients, and family members alike recognize the situation, even if hearing it so baldly expressed discomfits them.Why do physicians and other health care professionals, including lawyers and bioethicists, so often view families as “trouble”? And why do families so often see medical professionals as uncaring and uncommunicative? Presumably everyone wants (...) the same goal—recovery or the best possible outcome for the patient. And yet trouble clearly exists. We do not see the problem as one of “dysfunctional families” or “callous doctors,” although there are undoubtedly many of each. (shrink)

In this article, I use a nineteenth-century anatomical collection of wax moulages, currently off-staged in the storage facilities in the university where I work, to think about the matter of human remains. Rather than seeing the gross pathology moulages as inert teaching resources, I propose they are agential assemblages, entangled in which are human remains, and that they can be included amongst the dead. I consider their capacity to perform pastpresence work, a particular kind of work of the dead that (...) foregrounds erasures, such as the erasure of the many confined women suffering from syphilis whose bodies were used to cast moulages. This article considers how such pastpresence work might help us be response-able for uncared-for remains, such as the remains of “disappeared” women and infants who died in so-called Mother and Baby Homes, which have reappeared at the center of contemporary Irish public life. At a time when moulages are being reexhibited in museums internationally, I speculate about whether and how the collection might be restaged to perform subversive and utopian pastpresence work, destabilizing the erasures of conventional narratives of medicine and contributing to the crafting of a new and more careful order of things. (shrink)

The following is excerpted from Sean Gurd’s translation of Euripides’ Hippolytus published with Uitgeverij this year. Though he was judged “most tragic” in the generation after his death, though more copies and fragments of his plays have survived than of any other tragedian, and though his Orestes became the most widely performed tragedy in Greco-Roman Antiquity, during his lifetime his success was only moderate, and to him his career may have felt more like a failure. He was regularly selected to (...) have his plays performed in the annual festival of Dionysus at Athens. But the plays were performed in a competition, and in the competitions he lost and lost, winning first place only five times in a career that spanned more than forty years. His corpus reads like the remains of a life spent trying to get a few things right and never being quite satisfied: scenes and schematized combinations of elements recur again and again, each time slightly changed. Hippolytus itself is an example: it contains two scenes in which a sick or dying character lies on a couch or a stretcher and is surrounded by silence and grief; he had experimented with such scenes in Alcestis, and would work with them again in Herakles and Orestes. Nor, judging from appearances, was he immune to the desire to score a hit, or to satisfy the audiences and the judges at the competition. Hippolytus is a rewrite of another Hippolytus, performed several years earlier, which scandalized the audience and certainly did not take first place. In that earlier Hippolytus (called by later writers Hippolytus Veiled), Euripides fashioned a Phaedra who was neither ashamed of loving her stepson nor incapable of taking steps to satisfy her desire. The forwardness of her approach to Hippolytus so outraged him that he covered his head with a robe (hence the play’s later title). Euripides liked to write energetic and self-confident women like this. He staged his Medea in 431, just three years before he revised Hippolytus, and in it the jilted title character murders her children in revenge for Jason’s new marriage to a more politically advantageous wife. Another flop: the play came in third of three. Evidently the judges did not like their women showing agency, especially when the consequences were transgressive. “The ornament of women,” wrote another great Athenian a little earlier, “is silence.”i Euripides’ Medea and his first Phaedra had other decorations. So three years after Medea crashed and burned and some time after the first Hippolytus suffered the same fate, he produced another Hippolytus play with a different setting and story. How could this one not have been a reaction to the failure of the first? “Second thoughts are always better,” he has one of his characters say, as though he were offering an apology for his first thoughts on the same story. In this new version, Phaedra is suicidally ashamed of her love, choosing to die rather than have it discovered, and willing to bring down her beloved Hippolytus in the service of the same end. Now it is Phaedra herself who covers her head in shock and horror at her desire. Only an intermediary, a slave of the house and an old crone with her fingers in all sorts of illicit pots, communicates Phaedra’s secret – against orders – and in consequence brings about the demise of two resolutely moral figures. It worked. For his tale of two well-born nobles with an unswerving commitment to moral action, destroyed by the meddling of a slave (and by the hostility of some particularly uncaring divinities), the judges crowned Euripides winner. It was the first time he had won, after almost thirty years of work. *** What Hippolytus wants more than anything else, as he protests with outrage just before leaving Trozen for the last time, is the benefit of due process – oaths, witnesses, an investigation that would reveal who really lusted after whom. Ironic, given that in the first Hippolytus, as far as we can make out, he did get a trial – but too late, and Theseus’ successful processing of Hippolytus failed to prevent his death. I cannot help hearing in the second Hippolytus’ complaints the anger of his authorial semblable who lost year after year by a process of judging that might have seemed brutal to him. Judges took no cognizance of how he worked, how long or hard or why; they just voted, and Euripides lost. But then I hear, in the fate of the first Hippolytus, an even grimmer commentary. Processed or not, we lose. We run aground. At the very least, this might cast a darker shadow on the business of watching or reading a play: in that twilight, things move too fast to make a fair assessment and, in any case, the reasonably high definition of what you see and hear belies the truth of indistinction, the multiplicities just below the surface. Watching is a constrained activity, a form of captivity, but reading is plastic. This translation was begun to supply the script for an audio version of the play, recorded in the spring of 2012, and here and there it sacrifices literalness for sayability and the voices and passions of the actors on that occasion. But it was finished to be read, and engineered to create a reading caught between the poles of specificity and non-specificity that the play itself conjures and relies on at its generative core. Thus two texts: the one clear, perhaps overprecise, respectably modern in its presentation, and the other ancient, a reasonable approximation of the classical reading process, and indistinct in vital ways. Like early modern dramatic texts, the exact provenance and original function of the scripts that have made it down to us are unknown. We do know that the ultimate survival of Hippolytus was thanks to its wide-spread use as a school text. But its relation to the first performance in 428 BCE is a matter only of speculation. Euripides presumably had a fair copy before production began; it was probably modified during rehearsals. The actors may have had copies, too (probably the young men who served in the chorus did not). The chor?gos, a wealthy Athenian who paid for the production, might have been presented with or just made sure to get his hands on a high-quality text, to commemorate the play’s success. Fans might have been able to buy copies. Any one of these sources might have provided the ultimate progenitor of our text. Several of them might have, in fact, if later editors compared and conflated traditions. The plays toured extensively in the Greek-speaking world, and were restaged as repertoire for centuries afterwards. In the process they were subjected to enough modifications by producers and actors that in the later fourth century the Athenian statesman Lycurgus had a law passed prohibiting performances at Athens from deviating from the official “city” text of the tragedies (which he had commissioned). It is unlikely that the city text was the last word; but it marks an important moment in Athens’ role in their dissemination, since after this the major sites of textual curatorship moved overseas, to Alexandria, Pergamum, Rome, Antioch, Constantinople. Any single text of any single play is thus no more than a moment of clarity and stability, crossed and subtended by multiple vectors of change, including that of textual flux (from Euripides’ first drafts to the latest printed text) and that of Euripides’ life work as a writer, in the light of which the Hippolytus is just one attempt to produce something exactly right, to win the prize or finally satisfy himself or prove to himself that all this longing for perfection was a waste of time. I am intrigued by the possibility that a single text might somehow serve as a lens onto this wider zone of indistinction, representing a small region clearly but nonetheless containing a blurred image of the whole, like a Leibnizian monad. After all, no text is a witness: it is, rather, a perception and a performance, and what every Hippolytus must perform is the awkward overlay of singular and plural, social practise and subliminal drive, that structures the tragedy. Modern critical editions can do this by juxtaposing a (relatively) clean and simple text with a textual apparatus reporting variants and theorizing the relationship between textual instantiations. A translation lacks the resolution to catch the fine variations which feed into the construction of an apparatus. But there are other means to hand. Guessing at the exact words of the original text is always just that – guessing – though Hippolytus is less problematic than plays like Iphigenia at Aulis. But we can make a pretty secure guess at what such a text looked like. Texts read by fifth-century readers were fundamentally different from what is presented in the best medieval MSS and printed in modern publications. The texts of Euripides’ time and for many centuries afterwards did not indicate word division with spaces (or by any other means) and were extremely sparing in punctuation, often avoiding it altogether. There was only one “case” of letters – what we call “capitals.” Musical sections were inscribed as though they were prose, without line endings to reflect their rhythm or their rhetorical structure. There was no indication of the speakers within a dramatic text, either. The earliest surviving dramatic texts, which come from over a century after Euripides’ death and a time which was much more elaborate and precise in its textual culture, indicated speaker-change with a little line or paragraphos below the line and a double-point [:] at its end. This convention almost certainly does not date back to Euripides’ own time; it may not even date to Lycurgus. In any case, such indications were understood to be readers’ marks: they did not have the same authority as the text and they were subject to readers’ revisions. At least ideationally, if not in concrete and distinguishable fact, a dramatic text was understood as containing no indication of speaker-change (and certainly none of who was saying what). The reader had to figure that out for him-/herself. The clear, legible, easy texts we are accustomed to reading are the fabrications of medieval and modern reading cultures. The first text, then, presents the translation as the text would have been in the mid-fourth century, perhaps decades after Euripides’ death. The second text processes Hippolytus, makes sense of it and makes it “readable.” That is: too distinct, dangerously so. It gets in your way, conjures fantoms, tries to make you see. Fragments of the Hippolytus Veiled, otherwise almost entirely lost, are juxtaposed with similar passages in the text – not to suggest a reconstruction, but a dialogue and a complex set of reassessments. I have not tried to represent the full variety of textual variants, but I have signalled where, for one reason or another, the text is soft and different editions propose excisions or changes. The two texts must be read together: you, reader, form the bridge between the distinctly seen and the indistinct invisible. You, in the end, will be its mask. *** illsandhateddiseaseswhatcanidoforyouwhatshouldinotdohereisthelightandthebrightairyoursickbedisnowout s idethehouseyoureverywordwastocomeherebutyouwillrushbacktoyourbedroomagainyoufadequicklyyoudelig htinnothingyoudislikewhatyouhaveyoulovewhatyoudontitsbettertobesickthantendthesickthefirstissimpleto the secondattachesheartspainandhandsworkeveryhumanlifeispainfulthereisnoendtotoildarknesshidesbehindclo udswhateverisdearerthanlifeweproveunhappyloversofwhatshineshereforlackofknowledgeofanotherlifethere isnoproofforthingsbeneaththeearthonlystoriessustainus liftmybodystraightenmyheadthebondsofmylimbsareloosenedtakemyhandsandmypalearmsthishatistooheavy formyheadtoweartakeitoffspreadmyhairovermyshoulders couragechilddonttossandturnsoviolentlyyouwillbearyoursicknessmoreeasilywithpeaceandanoblemindallmort alssuffer aiaiiwanttodrinkpurewaterfromadewyspringiwanttoliebackandrestunderthetreesinsomegrassymeadowchildw hycrydontsaythesethingsnearthecrowdhurlingwordsmountedonmadness sendmetothemountainiwillgototheforestwherebeastkillingdogspressthespotteddeergodsilongtoshouttothedo gstoshootthethessalianjavelinpastmyblondhairtoholdthebarbeddartinmyhandwhythisanxietychildwhatdoyouc areabouthuntingwhydoyoulustforflowingspringstheresahillwithwaterjustnexttothetowerwecangetyouadrinkt h ereartemismistressofthesaltlakeandthecoursethunderingwithhorseshoovesiwishiwereonyourplainsbreakings t uds whythrowthesefrenziedwordsaboutjustnowyouweresettingoutforthemountaintohuntandnowyoulongforhorses onthewavelesssand thesethingsneedanoracletotellwhichgodreinsyouinanddrivesyoufromyoursenseschild whathaveidonehowfarhaveibeendrivenfromgoodthoughtsiwascrazyiwascursedbysomepowerpheupheualasn ursecovermyheadagainimashamedofwhativesaidcovermeatearmovesdownfrommyeyeanditembarrassesm eithurtstostraightenourmindanditisterribletobeinsanebesttodiebeforeyoubecomelucidagain illcoveryoubutwhenwilldeathcovermeimoldivelearnedalotmortalsshoulddrinkoffriendshipmoderatelynotfrom th edeepestmarrowofthesoulamindslovecharmsshouldbeeasytoundoorthrustawayortiemoretightlyitisaverydiffic ultweightforonesoultolaborovertwopeopleasiamwrackedbypainforhertoomuchdisciplinecausesmoreharmthan pleasureandwarswithhealthipraisetoomuchlessthannothinginexcessandthewiseagreewithme *** Scene 1 Enter Phaedra and the Nurse; the former is recumbent on a couch while the latter bustles about her with gestures that might be those of a caregiver or a guard. NURSE Ills and hated diseases! What can I do for you? What should I not do? Here is the light, and the bright air; your sick bed is now outside the house. Your every word was to come here, but you will rush back to your bedroom again. You fade quickly. You delight in nothing. You dislike what you have. You love what you don’t. It’s better to be sick than tend the sick – the first is simple. To the second attaches heart’s pain and hand’s work. Every human life is painful. There is no end to toil. Darkness hides behind clouds whatever is dearer than life. We prove unhappy lovers of what shines here for lack of knowledge of another life. There is no proof for things beneath the earth. Only stories sustain us. PHAEDRA Lift my body, straighten my head: the bonds of my limbs are loosened. Take my hands and my pale arms. This hat is too heavy for my head to wear. Take it off, spread my hair over my shoulders. NURSE Courage, child; don’t toss and turn so violently. You will bear your sickness more easily with peace and a noble mind. All mortals suffer. PHAEDRA Aiai. I want to drink pure water from a dewy spring. I want to lie back and rest under the trees in some grassy meadow. NURSE Child, why cry? Don’t say these things near the crowd, hurling words mounted on madness. PHAEDRA Send me to the mountain. I will go to the forest where beast-killing dogs press the spotted deer. Gods! I long to shout to the dogs, to shoot the Thessalian javelin past my blond hair, to hold the barbed dart in my hand. NURSE Why this anxiety, child? What do you care about hunting? Why do you lust for flowing springs? There’s a hill with water just next to the tower; we can get you a drink there. PHAEDRA Artemis, mistress of the salt lake and the course thundering with horse’s hooves: I wish I were on your plains breaking studs! NURSE Why throw these frenzied words about? Just now you were setting out for the mountain to hunt – and now you long for horses on the waveless sand. These things need an oracle to tell which god reins you in and drives you from your senses, child. PHAEDRA What have I done? How far have I been driven from good thoughts? I was crazy, I was cursed by some power. Pheu pheu. Alas. Nurse, cover my head again. I’m ashamed of what I’ve said. Cover me – a tear moves down from my eye and it embarrasses me. It hurts to straighten your mind and it is terrible to be insane. Best to die before you become lucid again. NURSE I’ll cover you. But when will death cover me? I’m old; I’ve learned a lot. Mortals should drink of friendship moderately, not from the deepest marrow of the soul. A mind’s love-charms should be easy to undo, or thrust away, or tie more tightly. It is a very difficult weight for one soul to labor over two people, as I am wracked by pain for her. Too much discipline causes more harm than pleasure and wars with health. I praise “too much” less than “nothing in excess,” and the wise agree with me. ***. (shrink)

This article critically looks at the challenges that are incumbent in the deployment of married soldiers who work for the South African National Defence Force. The SANDF previously deployed soldiers outside the borders of South Africa for a period of 6 months or less. But currently, the SANDF has a deployment period of 12 months. This period is twice that of the earlier period, which means that soldiers and their families have to spend 12 months apart from one another. This (...) has an adverse effect on the marriages of soldiers and makes the SANDF appear as an uncaring institute because its military operations tend to impact family lives. Using a qualitative research approach, this article explores the emic experiences of married soldiers who were deployed, and concludes by suggesting some pastoral guidelines that may prove useful for a multi-professional team handling the issues of deployment. (shrink)

Dune, released in 1984 and directed by David Lynch, from his own adaptedscreenplay of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel, provides a rich examplefor a reception study on ideas of authorship. On the one hand, Herbert’s 1960scult bestseller has evolved into a franchise and is thus regarded by Duneenthusiasts as a sacrosanct text. From a Lynch perspective, though, the film isusually seen as his least personal work – an event movie no less – and as such itholds the rank of the (...) most uncared for text in his filmic canon. It is the goal ofthis paper to analyse Dune’s meanings in relation to critical writings foundedupon the tenets of early auteurism so we might explore its function as areception preference for the predisposed reader. But rather than simply dismissauteurism as humanist idealism , the outcome of this paper seeks to also take account ofthe writing pleasures the author might bring to the interpretation of filmed texts. (shrink)

This study investigated subjective experiences of nine men who had been psychiatrically hospitalized upon being assessed as "dangerous-to-others-due-to-a-mental-illness." Using a phenomenological interviewing approach, researchers helped subjects construct narratives of their pre-hospitalization experiences. The research illuminated aspects of life-contexts that were shared among all or nearly all subjects: feeling ostracized and alone; struggling with longstanding and pervasive feelings of inadequacy; experiencing a sense or a fear of having little or no control or options in life; and feeling emotionally depressed, misunderstood, and (...) uncared for. Situations immediately preceding hospitalization were characterized by subjects experiencing threats to their sense of self-esteem that were of heightened intensity. In five cases, subjects reported anxiety related to self-fragmentation or becoming "nothing." Perceived threats to self-worth and self-structure were accompanied by anger and aggressive acts or impulses. In all cases, aggressive impulses and threats, and violence appeared to be in the service of self-validation and self-empowerment. In cases of violent behavior, an apparent function of the subjects' behaviors was toward self-consolidation. Based on findings, the researchers discuss implications consistent with humanistic psychology and existential psychotherapy principles and practices. (shrink)

There is a critique of capitalist market economy that consists in claiming not only that capitalist social relations are uncaring and alienating, nor only exploitative of the working class, but that the process of capitalist economy as a whole is a way of living, today globalized, that has gotten out of hand. Its essential nature is unmasked as a senseless circular movement that, besides ruthlessly exploiting natural resources, demeans human being itself and alienates it from the historical alternative of (...) a purportedly authentic mode of human being rooted in collective, solidaric subjectivity. The present article offers an alternative hermeneutic cast for understanding capitalism as the gainful game that can serve as philosophical orientation in fighting for a free and fair social interplay in which the powers and abilities of free individuals are appropriately and reciprocally estimated and esteemed. This requires, first and foremost, seeing through the fetishisms inherent in the valorization of reified value that the mature Marx identified in his critiques of political economy as the essential nature of capitalism. Such critical insight is necessary for orientation also in today’s predicament of the ever more encroaching and ensnaring cyberworld. (shrink)

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation (...) of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come. (shrink)

This article investigates the hypothesis that greater human-livestock intimacy can deter cruelty and mitigate suffering in the industrial production of animals for human consumption. The history of industrial agriculture in North America is one of increasingly utilitarian, profit-based, and technologically mediated relationships between humans and the animals they raise and kill for food. Under what circumstances is the physical and emotional distance between producers, consumers, and consumed animals an impetus toward uncaring and irresponsible relationships? Do even intimate interspecies encounters (...) in livestock production involve cruelty and suffering? This article addresses these questions and evaluates reform options by attending to both the localized arrangements and systemic structures of industrial livestock production. Finally, it proposes a risk-mapping strategy to assess the plausibility of caring intimacies in livestock production. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 58-77 [Access article in PDF] The Ethics of Care and the Private Woodwind Lesson Nancy Nourse Jeremy's family was getting ready for the concert. It wasn't that he was tired of watching his father conduct. He loved his father and he loved the concerts. But people were always asking Jeremy the same question and that question didn't seem to have an answer....They (...) weren't even inside the concert hall before the doorman smiled at Jeremy and asked, "Well, young man, do you think you'll be a conductor like your father?" 1Children like Jeremy, situated in the world of established music-making, are routinely subjected to stereotypical expectations, often not seen for who they are themselves, but for the qualities of their situatedness. Jeremy, as a result, found himself continually bombarded with this question which spokein fortissimo tones that the inquirer was impressed by the stature of his maestro father, but really did not seem to care to see the young boy as a person in his own right. The dreaded question, that he so frequently faced, festered in him, shouting of his own lack of personhood in its flagrant assumptions. But what voice did he have? After the concert: a lady in a long gown and a huge strand of pearls came in next [backstage]...."So this is your little son," she cried. Jeremy blushed as she kissed the top of his head and squeezed his face so that he looked like a fish. "Tell me, young man, are you going to be a conductor like your father?" 2Of course stories such as Jeremy's in which individuals suffer because others have not been truly caring, are not unique to the world of music. Such thoughtless pleasantries are nothing more than symptoms of the widespread absence of knowing and care experienced in day-to-day living. While Patricia Benner and Suzanne Gordon suggest that there are few people who would wish to be perceived as uncaring persons, there are often spoken platitudes about care, especially about large institutions, that seemshallow and meaningless. 3 Take, for example, a hospital whose slogan claims [End Page 58] it is caring, but is only really interested in research or profit, or the doctor who quadruple books patients for appointments all the while insisting that he really does care about his patients. The obstacles to true understanding about care include the view that care is merely a sentiment that need be expressed, but not the thoughtful planning out of means to create ample opportunities to enact deeds of caring. 4 In day-to-day situations of modern living with big corporations, governments, and institutions, there may be individuals who claim to care, but there are no features in these organizations' blueprints that ensure and take responsibility for providing care. Care must extend beyond sentiment into action.In the name of superior curriculum and specialist teachers and programs,tiny rural schools were abandoned and students were moved into bigger and bigger schools. As schools and educational institutions have greatly increased in size over the past century, teachers have found it more and more difficult to connect to the larger and larger number of students found on their class rosters. Beyond their class lists how can teachers really be responsible for the sea of faces for whom they cannot even supply names? In The Students are Watching, Theodore and Nancy Sizer ask: Do [current] conditions in the school allow each student to be known well?...Anonymity is the curse of good teaching and inevitably contributes to corner-cutting. If no one knows the students in a high school, it is easy for them to drift through. 5Benner and Gordon cite the shop program in a vocational school as an ideal setting in which teachers have the opportunity to develop caring relationships with their students since the settings are informal, class time is significantly extended, and the teachers work with the same students over several years. 6 Special education teachers as well usually... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 58-77 [Access article in PDF] The Ethics of Care and the Private Woodwind Lesson Nancy Nourse Jeremy's family was getting ready for the concert. It wasn't that he was tired of watching his father conduct. He loved his father and he loved the concerts. But people were always asking Jeremy the same question and that question didn't seem to have an answer....They (...) weren't even inside the concert hall before the doorman smiled at Jeremy and asked, "Well, young man, do you think you'll be a conductor like your father?" 1Children like Jeremy, situated in the world of established music-making, are routinely subjected to stereotypical expectations, often not seen for who they are themselves, but for the qualities of their situatedness. Jeremy, as a result, found himself continually bombarded with this question which spokein fortissimo tones that the inquirer was impressed by the stature of his maestro father, but really did not seem to care to see the young boy as a person in his own right. The dreaded question, that he so frequently faced, festered in him, shouting of his own lack of personhood in its flagrant assumptions. But what voice did he have? After the concert: a lady in a long gown and a huge strand of pearls came in next [backstage]...."So this is your little son," she cried. Jeremy blushed as she kissed the top of his head and squeezed his face so that he looked like a fish. "Tell me, young man, are you going to be a conductor like your father?" 2Of course stories such as Jeremy's in which individuals suffer because others have not been truly caring, are not unique to the world of music. Such thoughtless pleasantries are nothing more than symptoms of the widespread absence of knowing and care experienced in day-to-day living. While Patricia Benner and Suzanne Gordon suggest that there are few people who would wish to be perceived as uncaring persons, there are often spoken platitudes about care, especially about large institutions, that seemshallow and meaningless. 3 Take, for example, a hospital whose slogan claims [End Page 58] it is caring, but is only really interested in research or profit, or the doctor who quadruple books patients for appointments all the while insisting that he really does care about his patients. The obstacles to true understanding about care include the view that care is merely a sentiment that need be expressed, but not the thoughtful planning out of means to create ample opportunities to enact deeds of caring. 4 In day-to-day situations of modern living with big corporations, governments, and institutions, there may be individuals who claim to care, but there are no features in these organizations' blueprints that ensure and take responsibility for providing care. Care must extend beyond sentiment into action.In the name of superior curriculum and specialist teachers and programs,tiny rural schools were abandoned and students were moved into bigger and bigger schools. As schools and educational institutions have greatly increased in size over the past century, teachers have found it more and more difficult to connect to the larger and larger number of students found on their class rosters. Beyond their class lists how can teachers really be responsible for the sea of faces for whom they cannot even supply names? In The Students are Watching, Theodore and Nancy Sizer ask: Do [current] conditions in the school allow each student to be known well?...Anonymity is the curse of good teaching and inevitably contributes to corner-cutting. If no one knows the students in a high school, it is easy for them to drift through. 5Benner and Gordon cite the shop program in a vocational school as an ideal setting in which teachers have the opportunity to develop caring relationships with their students since the settings are informal, class time is significantly extended, and the teachers work with the same students over several years. 6 Special education teachers as well usually... (shrink)

The question I want to discuss is “How can I say ‘No’ to a fund-raising appeal?” Since many people apparently find it easy to say “No,” it is not clear what the problem is. Put briefly, the problem is this: I do not want to think of myself as uncaring, unfeeling, and insensitive to the needs of others. And yet, within the last year I have not responded to appeals for funds from a wide variety of causes: medical research, (...) famine relief, freedom of speech, environmental protection. I have turned down requests for support of scholarly magazines, research institutes, and other good causes. My only moderate-sized contribution during that time has been to the capital campaign of an organization of which I am a member. I have enough to have made small contributions to all of the organizations from which I received appeals, but not enough so that my contributions to any single cause would be of major significance. How can I justify not giving? The problem arises because these appeals apparently put moral claims upon me: they say that people are suffering and have needs, and you can help to meet them. Or they say that the intellectual and cultural life of our society will be enriched if you help. One traditional philosophic view holds that moral claims have a special status. They override political, economic, social, and other claims. The only thing, according to this view, that can free one from a moral claim is another moral claim. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly apparent that human embryo research has the very real potential to generate significant humanitarian benefits. Equally, it is clear that the destruction of embryos that such research inevitably involves is highly controversial within societies such as ours, where many hold either that from the moment of conception the embryo is morally considerable or that as a member of the human species it should not be treated as a mere means. How might we balance the potential humanitarian (...) benefits of embryo research against the various strongly felt moral objections to such use?In this rich and highly sophisticated work, Guenin argues for the experimental use of a bounded range of embryos, namely those which were intentionally produced for research ex utero and for which the progenitor has explicitly banned any intrauterine transfer. He argues that since they are not possible persons, it is morally permissible to perform experiments on this set of embryos.1 Indeed, he suggests that given the suffering that such research might relieve, it would be uncaring for us not to undertake it.As one might expect, the focus of the book is primarily on stem cell research. The ‘pluripotent’ stem cells one finds in …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s ZarathustraKathleen Marie HigginsThe Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, by Stanley Rosen; 286 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, $18.95 paper.In Ecce Homo Nietzsche remarks that he wants to be read the way good old philologists read Horace. Stanley Rosen has fullled this Nietzschean wish. His Mask of the Enlightenment interprets Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with astute attention, and it delivers on Rosen’s (...) stated aim of avoiding both the obscurantism of postmoderns and the selective attention of analytic philosophers. It is philological in the best sense, balancing its consideration of detail with a sense of the book’s larger context, as well as the context of textual predecessors to whom Nietzsche refers and responds.Rosen reads Nietzsche as a fundamentally political thinker, who seeks to transform humanity’s collective circumstances. The ultimate goal of this effort [End Page 193] is “to breed a new race of mankind” that would supersede the decadent existing race (p. 56). This positive aim, however, requires the destruction of the existing race to make room for the new one.Zarathustra, according to Rosen, is an artistic statement of these aspirations and a tactic for achieving them. From the beginning, Zarathustra calls for the appearance of the superman and the destruction of contemporary European culture. Aware of how far his contemporaries are from the superman, Zarathustra utilizes a double rhetoric, concealing his real intent from all but the select few.Zarathustra addresses noble lies to the crowd, which make his doctrines appear to be afrmative and salvational, but try to seduce the majority to their own self-destruction. Preaching the coming of the superman and the doctrine of eternal recurrence (the view that time recurs cyclically), Zarathustra’s real purpose is to accelerate nihilism and hasten the destruction of current European culture. This aim, however, is concealed by the seemingly afrmative character of these doctrines.Zarathustra’s esoteric message rests on Nietzsche’s materialistic reductionism, according to Rosen. Nietzsche understands reality, fundamentally, to be nothing but chaotic uctuations among accumulating points of force. Even the expression “will to power” suggests a more coherent ontological structure than reality exhibits. The doctrine of “will to power” is an exoteric idea that conceals Nietzsche’s belief that the world is a chaos of uctuating points of force. Will, subjectivity, and physics are all illusions that disguise a cruel and uncaring world.The doctrine of eternal recurrence, in its esoteric sense, reects this vision. Claiming that the sequence of temporal events recurs endlessly, the doctrine is an image for the universe’s spontaneous being, which has no inherent value. This vision is nihilistic, for it implies the illusory status of our subjective selves, any sense of progress, and even our scientic theories. If reality is ultimately chaos, our lives are meaningless.So understood, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is not obviously compatible with Zarathustra’s call for the superman. The superman project is doomed to fail, since eternal recurrence implies that the condition of decadence will recur, even if a superman is generated at some point. Eternal recurrence is also incompatible with amor fati, the love of fate that Zarathustra preaches. Eternal recurrence is an image of chance, of the random happening of force-points, while amor fati is a deterministic vision. Chance and necessity are the same in their human signicance. Both deny human freedom. Chance means that our behavior arises from the un-ordered movements of force points.One of the achievements of Rosen’s book is its mapping of such tensions within Zarathustra, tensions that motivate the drama of the book. These tensions are numerous. Zarathustra preaches the superman to those he seeks as followers, but followers are inherently incapable of the superman’s creative [End Page 194] spontaneity. Zarathustra’s bombast, used to attract attention, is in tension with the subtlety of his actual message. The activism implied by Zarathustra’s preaching is at odds with the fatalism of amor fati. The rank-ordering of human types, a feature of Zarathustra’s elitism, is incompatible with his inner doctrine that the world is chaos.Rosen concludes that some of these tensions... (shrink)