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result(s) for
"Roodt, Vasti"
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On public happiness
2014
Theories of happiness usually consider happiness as something that matters to us from a first-person perspective. In this paper, I defend a conception of public happiness that is distinct from private or first-person happiness. Public happiness is presented as a feature of the system of right that defines the political relationship between citizens, as opposed to their personal mental states, desires or well-being. I begin by outlining the main features of public happiness as an Enlightenment ideal. Next, I relate the distinction between the political and the personal to the distinction between having normative reasons for a particular political arrangement and merely having a 'pro-attitude' towards a state of affairs that accords with one's preferred definition of happiness. Following this, I demonstrate why well-being, understood as a normative rather than a purely descriptive conception of personal happiness, nevertheless cannot serve as a normative reason in the political domain. In the final section, I show why normative reason-giving matters for the relationship between citizens, and how such reason-giving relates to public happiness.
Journal Article
Nietzsche, Power and Politics
2009,2008
Nietzsche's legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzsche's political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly, Villa, van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines.
Editors' introduction: the question of happiness
2014
The question of happiness - its nature, value and the proper means of achieving it - has played a role in the thought of Socrates and Plato, Epicureans and Stoics, Aristotelians and church fathers. Happiness has been a focal point of Enlightenment optimism and of post-Enlightenment pessimism; it has always been of central concern to moral theorists and has had a starring role in political philosophy. Philosophers have argued that happiness is a matter of faith or of the end of faith, of prudence or virtue, reason or passion, pleasure or contentment, a matter of the mind or of the body, a way of feeling or a way of being.
Journal Article
IDENTITEIT EN WÊRELDLIKHEID: WAAROM IDENTITEITSPOLITIEK FAAL
by
Roodt, Vasti
2006
The purpose of this paper is to engage in critical reflection on identity politics as a mode of resistance to the experience of oppression, marginalisation or social exclusion. I argue that the notion of an identity-driven politics springs from a fundamentaldisaffection with the world as it is given to us, and that this disaffection is reinforced in the very attempt to overcome it. In support of my criticism I then try to sketchan alternative conception of identity and politics that does not run aground on the same difficulties. My argument consists of three parts. First, I delineate the theoreticalbackground to contemporary identity politics and point out a number of problematic assumptions that underlie such a conception of identity and politics. Second, I try to substantiate this initial critical assessment of identity politics by appealing to Hannah Arendt's analysis of the interplay between identity and worldliness. The purpose here isto show that identity is bound up with the world that lies between us as opposed to being tied to an exclusive place anyone occupies within the world. In the third and last part of the article I relate this notion of worldliness to Arendt's notion of amor mundi. I argue in this regard that amor mundi involves a reconciliation with the world as ithas been given to us, which nevertheless finds expression in judgements about what ought to appear in this world rather than a passive acceptance of the world as we find it. On the basis of this insight, I eventually try to demonstrate that Arendt offers us thepossibility of resisting marginalisation and oppression for the sake of the world we share with one another rather than for the sake of the affirmation of any pre-determined identity.
Journal Article
AMOR FATI, AMOR MUNDI: HISTORY, ACTION AND WORLDLINESS IN NIETZSCHE AND ARENDT
2001
The purpose of this article is twofold: to examine the origins and ruinous consequences of the teleological conception of history that characterises modernity, and to explore an alternative, non-instrumental conception of history and historical judgement that does not fall prey to the snares inherent in the modern project. To this end, the article draws on insights generated by Nietzsche and Arendt in their respective analyses of the link between history, action and the worldly domain of cultural and/or political engagement. The argument is divided into three sections: the first section explores the significance of history as portrayed by Nietzsche and Arendt, followed, in section two, by an analysis of their respective criticisms of a teleological conception of history that underlies the philosophical and political practices of modernity. The third part of the paper then explores action, narrative and judgement as constituent elements in an alternative conception of the relationship between historicity and worldliness. This alternative, it is argued, constitutes a challenge to the privatised individuals of late-modernity to re-think our relations with one another in the context of a shared, public domain; that is to say, to re-think history and praxis beyond the confines of subjectivity or teleology for the love of the world that lies between us.
Journal Article