Projects / Programmes
Reanimating Cosmic Justice: Poethics of the Feminine
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.11.00 |
Humanities |
Theology |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| H155 |
Humanities |
Moral science |
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.03 |
Humanities |
Philosophy, Ethics and Religion |
Antigone, Mary, Savitri, cosmic justice, unwritten laws, moral shame, guilt, bodily suffering, carnal violence, compassion, peace
Researchers (11)
Organisations (2)
Abstract
The project in based on a new interpretation of Antigone and her ethical act. According to one of the leading philosophers of our age, Luce Irigaray, unveiling the meaning of Antigone is not an easy task in our culture. It is a task requiring from us a descent into entirely different modes of our thinking and ethics as we inherited them from our predecessors. This means that new ways of thinking in theology, religious studies and ethics, including intercultural and interreligious views are needed. In the first part of this project, Antigone will be compared with Savitri from the Mahabharata and Mary as represented in contemporary feminist thinking and theology: they will be analysed as three guardians of sacred cosmic orders and orders of femininity, and related to the logic of unwritten/cosmic laws. In this, the project team will focus on divine laws, as represented in ancient religious thought (Mediterranean, Ancient Near East, pre-Homeric Greece, pre-Vedic India) and trace their universal ethical potential. This cosmico-ethical message will be analysed in the second part of the project against the background of a new culture of shame and responsibility towards others. Here we will relate the investigation of divine, cosmic, unwritten ethical laws and unconditional ethical demands with notions of guilt and shame. In this part the research will centre on the contrast between the feeling of shame and the feeling of guilt, while arguing that a restorative cultivation of moral shame underlies or is part of the cosmic justice. Finally, this project will propose that universally, no duty and no human law can be higher than our deepest cosmico-ethical faith and bodily/visceral compassion and sensibility to the other in pain. For that purpose, the project will deal in its third part with case studies of extreme violence in the forgetting of “ethics of the face of the other” and shame in the selected contexts of East- and Southeast Asian cultures (Cambodia and China).
Significance for science
The importance of this project and its relevance to the development of science and scientific knowledge is in its regrounding of the ethical thinking in the age of ethical and moral crisis in Modernity. The importance of this project and its relevance for scientific development and knowledge is in rethinking and reevaluationg the forgotten and even betrayed role of G/goddesses in ancient contexts of Mediterranean, Near East and India, and in an original application of these insights to the newly conceptualized ethics of shame. Ethics of shame is the negativity of any aspect of violence, including the 'violence' towards corpse/dead bodies (as in case of Antigone). In this respect, the originality of this project for gaining new scientific knowledge lies also in its close relationship to contemporary debates within the field of Asian studies (India, China, SE Asia - Cambodia). The project will achieve this by invoking new ethical models based on the forgotten ethical layers of cosmic justice, various orders of femininity and theology of forgotten G/goddesses, and, in its second part, on morality as related to shame, and confront all of them towards ethical thinking, as based on prevalent forms of justice and moralic guilt in theology and philosophy. The principal goal of this project is to rethink the fundamental theological and ethical pressupositions of justice by analysing Antigone, Mary and Savitri as three sacred women and thus enabling project team to reground scientific knowledge on moral shame vs. moralic guilt dilemma. This is an innovative approach in humanities in two ways: firstly, by introducing the concept of the "poetics of the feminine" into the contemporary theological and religious thinking, and secondly, by introducing the newly thematized and conceptualized concept of "moral shame" into debates in theological and philosophical ethics.
Significance for the country
We live in times where our eyes and our hearts are perceiving and witnessing from day to day the most horrible images of sufferings and tragic deaths of numerous migrants – children, mothers, fathers – in their extreme vulnerability, and the fragility of their existence. We are also facing in the last decades horrific scenes of war, sexual violence and war rape in various regions of the world, where masculine power and quasi-religious ideology have taken control over communities, and have thus been annihilating the last remains of an ethical life. We all – as members of a global communiy – have been affected by this and are also have our responsibility towards those victims of your Modernity. Humanistic reflection, which is a key motivation to embark on a scientific inquiry in this project, must help us to become aware of these tragic events and enable us to imagine a better and brighter world for future generations, based on peaceful coexistence among nations, cultures, and religions. It seems thus that today we indeed have lost our relation to the cosmos and its ethical order. This project thus wishes to desensiblize individuals towards some unjustly forgotten ethical layers in ancient religious and poetic (Antigone, Savitri) frameworks. The aim of this project is thus to revitalize in various religious and intercultural environments the concepts of cosmic justice and shame and related ethical thinking, and to revitalize in this framework the ethics of the feminine for our age. The principle aim of this project is thus to establish new spaces in ethics, where respect for life, generational orders, and community would be able to prevail and lead us towards new future world culture of compassion and peace. This will impact our personal, but also cultural and social (political) sensibilities towards migrants, refugees, victims of war, people without their dignity, and all others, being at the very edge of their existence.
The project team has also a young researcher as its member and thus will ensure the trasnmission of scientific knowledge directly to the younger generation of researchers.
The project team consists of 9 members, of which 5 are female and 4 male. This will help achieving one of principal project goals - which is in re-sensibilisizing for the forgotten orders of femininity in theology and philosophy of religion.
Most important scientific results
Interim report,
final report
Most important socioeconomically and culturally relevant results
Interim report,
final report
