DOCSLIB.ORG

UNIVERSITY of CAPE TOWN Universityapril 2019

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
UNIVERSITY of CAPE TOWN Universityapril 2019 EVERYDAY AESTHETIC EXISTENCE AND DISCIPLESHIP Exploring the Connections between Aesthetics, Faith and Ethics in Being Human and Becoming Christian Adrian Coates Town Supervisor: Prof. John de Gruchy Cape of Thesis Presented for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of Religious Studies UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN UniversityApril 2019 The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derivedTown from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes Capeonly. of Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University i DECLARATION I, Adrian Coates, hereby declare that this thesis is my own unaided work, both in concept and execution, and that apart from the normal guidance from my supervisor, I have received no assistance. No part of this work has been previously submitted for academic examination towards any qualification. Signed: April 2019 ii ABSTRACT The aim of this project is to provide a theological basis for the practice of discipleship in the world as a form of aesthetic existence. The study is framed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s cryptic call for a recovery of Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of aesthetic existence in being Christian, set against the backdrop of their mutual concern for the captivity of the church to Christendom. In addition to the contribution by Kierkegaard (discipleship as poetic living) and Bonhoeffer (Christian living as polyphonous this-worldly celebration of Christological reality), three further key intellectuals have been selected, each of whom contributes an important dimension to understanding everyday aesthetic existence as discipleship. Drawing from contemporary neuropsychological findings, Iain McGilchrist’s research points to the fundamental role that aesthetic existence plays in being human and relating to the world. Graham Ward’s work builds on this by highlighting that embodied and affective engagement with the world both plays a significant role in faith formation and concomitantly frames ethical life by conjoining praxis and poiesis through incarnational living. Aesthetics is not to be disconnected from action, as Nicholas Wolterstorff elucidates, but is best understood in light of social practice, playing a narratival role toward specific teloi, however implicit this may be. Ultimately, this study concludes that a liturgical orientation to all of life rightly orders the formative power of aesthetic existence in service to the Word and world, thereby contributing to discipleship, as opposed to the aestheticized creation and sustenance of virtuality. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to extend sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. John de Gruchy. His hospitable wisdom and guidance has been elucidatory, as I am sure it has been for the many other students he has supervised over the years. I count it a true privilege to have had the opportunity to spend many warm hours with him, gleaning from his wealth of knowledge and depth of insight, integrated as it is with both his faith and life experience. His own life depicts the inextricable unity of thoughtful faith, everyday aesthetics and ethical action in being Christian. I would also like to honour the five key intellectuals that I have engaged in this project: Søren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Iain McGilchrist, Graham Ward and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Their work and lives model rigorous intellectual pursuit, yet never disconnecting theoretical abstraction from the reality of life as lived. Our world is the richer for it. Thank you to all those who have supported me and made this journey possible, notably Larry and Margaret Reimer, without whom I would not have made it thus far. To all my peers and professors at Regent College, thank you for laying the seeds of this study during the rich time I shared with you. Thank you also to the Religious Studies Department at UCT, and Tasneem Wiese in particular, whose diligent and patient administrative support made my journey more manageable. Thanks also to Gill D'achada for proofreading. Finally, I owe my family – my children, Jude, Hannah and Luke, and particularly my wife, Michelle – a deep debt of gratitude for all their understanding, support and sacrifice over the years of study. Thank you for your longsuffering love, belief and encouragement. It is both a cliché and understatement to say that I could not have done it without you, but it remains profoundly true. Soli Deo gloria. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION — EVERYDAY AESTHETIC EXISTENCE AND DISCIPLESHIP ....................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Rationale: The persistence of discipleship as cheap grace ................................................... 2 1.2 A Key Term: “Aesthetic Existence” ....................................................................................... 6 1.3 Dialogue as Method .................................................................................................................. 6 1.4 Locating the Thesis in Contemporary Debate ....................................................................... 8 1.5 Synopsis ................................................................................................................................... 15 CHAPTER 2: KIERKEGAARD & THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXISTENCE ... 18 2.1 Kierkegaard’s Context: Calling for true discipleship amidst aestheticism ...................... 19 2.1.1 A Reaction to Romantic Self-creation .............................................................................. 20 2.1.2 A Reaction to Danish Christendom and “Cheap Grace” .................................................. 22 2.2 Kierkegaard’s Stages of Existence ........................................................................................ 27 2.2.1 Interpreting the “Stages”: The complexity of Kierkegaard’s authorship .......................... 28 2.2.2 Aesthetic Existence as a Stage of Life: Kierkegaard’s rejection of aestheticism ............. 29 2.2.3 Aesthetic Existence & Poetic Living: A clarification of terms ......................................... 33 2.3 Christian Poetic Living: The role of mature aesthetic existence in discipleship .............. 37 2.3.1 The Continuity of the Aesthetic in Ethico-Religious Existence ....................................... 38 2.3.2 Poetic Living as Discipleship ............................................................................................ 40 2.3.3 Imitating Christ: The unification of the infinite with finite aesthetic existence ............... 43 2.3.4 Second Immediacy ............................................................................................................ 46 2.3.5 The Imagination ................................................................................................................ 47 2.4 Summary: Christian existence amidst the sensory immediacy of Deer Park ................... 50 2.5 Spotlight on Music: Music as archetypal sensory immediacy ............................................ 55 2.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 58 CHAPTER 3: BONHOEFFER & THE CELEBRATION OF AESTHETIC EXISTENCE .................................................................................................. 60 3.1 Bonhoeffer’s Call for a Recovery of Aesthetic Existence ................................................... 60 3.2 The Christological Affirmation of Worldly Reality ............................................................ 63 3.2.1 Bonhoeffer’s Description of Reality ................................................................................. 63 3.2.2 Bonhoeffer’s Embrace of This-Worldly Reality ............................................................... 65 3.2.3 Ultimate and Penultimate Reality ..................................................................................... 70 3.3 Discipleship as Seeing and Partaking in Reality ................................................................. 74 3.3.1 Imagining Reality .............................................................................................................. 74 v 3.3.2 Participating in Reality ..................................................................................................... 76 3.4 Implications for Everyday Aesthetic Existence ................................................................... 77 3.5 Spotlight on Music: Sensory immediacy generates “living” metaphors ........................... 79 3.5.1 Bonhoeffer’s Personal Embrace of Music ........................................................................ 79 3.5.2 Bonhoeffer’s Musical Metaphors ..................................................................................... 81 3.5.3 Music as Paradigm-Forming ............................................................................................. 84 3.5.4 Summary ........................................................................................................................... 89 3.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 90 CHAPTER 4: MCGILCHRIST & AESTHETIC EXISTENCE AS FUNDAMENTAL TO BEING HUMAN ............................................................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • A Topic Model Approach to Represent and Classify American Football Plays
    A Topic Model Approach to Represent and Classify American Football Plays Jagannadan Varadarajan1 1 Advanced Digital Sciences Center of Illinois, Singapore [email protected] 2 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Indriyati Atmosukarto1 Arabia [email protected] 3 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL USA Shaunak Ahuja1 [email protected] Bernard Ghanem12 [email protected] Narendra Ahuja13 [email protected] Automated understanding of group activities is an important area of re- a Input ba Feature extraction ae Output motion angle, search with applications in many domains such as surveillance, retail, Play type templates and labels time & health care, and sports. Despite active research in automated activity anal- plays player role run left pass left ysis, the sports domain is extremely under-served. One particularly diffi- WR WR QB RB QB abc Documents RB cult but significant sports application is the automated labeling of plays in ] WR WR . American Football (‘football’), a sport in which multiple players interact W W ....W 1 2 D run right pass right . WR WR on a playing field during structured time segments called plays. Football . RB y y y ] QB QB 1 2 D RB plays vary according to the initial formation and trajectories of players - w i - documents, yi - labels WR Trajectories WR making the task of play classification quite challenging. da MedLDA modeling pass midrun mid pass midrun η βk K WR We define a play as a unique combination of offense players’ trajec- WR y QB d RB QB RB tories as shown in Fig.
    [Show full text]
  • Automatic Annotation of American Football Video Footage for Game Strategy Analysis
    https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2021.6.IRIACV-303 © 2021, Society for Imaging Science and Technology Automatic Annotation of American Football Video Footage for Game Strategy Analysis Jacob Newman, Jian-Wei Lin, Dah-Jye Lee, and Jen-Jui Liu, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA Abstract helping coaches study and understand both how their team plays Annotation and analysis of sports videos is a challeng- and how other teams play. This could assist them in game plan- ing task that, once accomplished, could provide various bene- ning before the game or, if allowed, making decisions in real time, fits to coaches, players, and spectators. In particular, Ameri- thereby improving the game. can Football could benefit from such a system to provide assis- This paper presents a method of player detection from a sin- tance in statistics and game strategy analysis. Manual analysis of gle image immediately before the play starts. YOLOv3, a pre- recorded American football game videos is a tedious and ineffi- trained deep learning network, is used to detect the visible play- cient process. In this paper, as a first step to further our research ers, followed by a ResNet architecture which labels the players. for this unique application, we focus on locating and labeling in- This research will be a foundation for future research in tracking dividual football players from a single overhead image of a foot- key players during a video. With this tracking data, automated ball play immediately before the play begins. A pre-trained deep game analysis can be accomplished. learning network is used to detect and locate the players in the image.
    [Show full text]
  • Using Camera Motion to Identify Types of American Football Plays
    USING CAMERA MOTION TO IDENTIFY TYPES OF AMERICAN FOOTBALL PLAYS Mihai Lazarescu, Svetha Venkatesh School of Computing, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth 6001, W.A. Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT learning algorithm used to train the system. The results This paper presents a method that uses camera motion pa- are described in Section 5 with the conclusions presented rameters to recognise 7 types of American Football plays. in Section 6. The approach is based on the motion information extracted from the video and it can identify short and long pass plays, 2. PREVIOUS WORK short and long running plays, quaterback sacks, punt plays and kickoff plays. This method has the advantage that it is Motion parameters have been used in the past since they fast and it does not require player or hall tracking. The sys- provide a simple, fast and accurate way to search multi- tem was trained and tested using 782 plays and the results media databases for specific shots (for example a shot of show that the system has an overall classification accuracy a landscape is likely to involve a significant amount of pan, of 68%. whilst a shot of an aerobatic sequence is likely to contain roll). 1. INTRODUCTION Previous work done towards tbe recognition of Ameri- can Football plays has generally involved methods that com- The automatic indexing and retrieval of American Football bine clues from several sources such as video, audio and text plays is a very difficult task for which there are currently scripts. no tools available. The difficulty comes from both the com- A method for tracking players in American Football grey- plexity of American Football itself as well as the image pro- scale images that makes use of context knowledge is de- cessing involved for an accurate analysis of the plays.
    [Show full text]
  • For the Win: Risk-Sensitive Decision-Making in Teams
    Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, J. Behav. Dec. Making, 30: 462–472 (2017) Published online 1 June 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/bdm.1965 For the Win: Risk-Sensitive Decision-Making in Teams JOSH GONZALES,1 SANDEEP MISHRA2* and RONALD D. CAMP II2 1Department of Psychology, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan Canada 2Faculty of Business Administration, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan Canada ABSTRACT Risk-sensitivity theory predicts that decision-makers should prefer high-risk options in high need situations when low-risk options will not meet these needs. Recent attempts to adopt risk-sensitivity as a framework for understanding human decision-making have been promising. However, this research has focused on individual-level decision-making, has not examined behavior in naturalistic settings, and has not examined the influ- ence of multiple levels of need on decision-making under risk. We examined group-level risk-sensitive decision-making in two American football leagues: the National Football League (NFL) and the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I. Play decisions from the 2012 NFL (Study 1; N = 33 944), 2013 NFL (Study 2; N = 34 087), and 2012 NCAA (Study 3; N = 15 250) regular seasons were analyzed. Results dem- onstrate that teams made risk-sensitive decisions based on two distinct needs: attaining first downs (a key proximate goal in football) and acquiring points above parity. Evidence for risk-sensitive decisions was particularly strong when motivational needs were most salient. These findings are the first empirical demonstration of team risk-sensitivity in a naturalistic organizational setting. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
    [Show full text]
  • Flex Football Rule Book – ½ Field
    Flex Football Rule Book – ½ Field This rule book outlines the playing rules for Flex Football, a limited-contact 9-on-9 football game that incorporates soft-shelled helmets and shoulder pads. For any rules not specifically addressed below, refer to either the NFHS rule book or the NCAA rule book based on what serves as the official high school-level rule book in your state. Flex 1/2 Field Setup ● The standard football field is divided in half with the direction of play going from the mid field out towards the end zone. ● 2 Flex Football games are to be run at the same going in opposing directions towards the end zones on their respective field. ● The ball will start play at the 45-yard line - game start and turnovers. ● The direction of offensive play will go towards the existing end zones. ● If a ball is intercepted: the defender needs to only return the interception to the 45-yard line to be considered a Defensive touchdown. Team Size and Groupings ● Each team has nine players on the field (9 on 9). ● A team can play with eight if it chooses, losing an eligible receiver on offense and non line-men on defense. ● If a team is two players short, it will automatically forfeit the game. However, the opposing coach may lend players in order to allow the game to be played as a scrimmage. The officials will call the game as if it were a regular game. ● Age ranges can be defined as common age groupings (9-and-under, 12-and under) or school grades (K-2, junior high), based on the decision of each organization.
    [Show full text]
  • London Junior Mustangs Football Club Football
    LONDON JUNIOR MUSTANGS FOOTBALL CLUB FOOTBALL TERMINOLOGY GUIDE Text courtesy of Kevin Holmes, HB Sport Management Services 1 Table of Contents STATEMENT .................................................................................................................................................................. 3 OFFENSE ....................................................................................................................................................................... 3 POSITIONS ................................................................................................................................................................ 3 Offensive Line ...................................................................................................................................................... 3 Backfield ............................................................................................................................................................... 3 Receivers .............................................................................................................................................................. 4 NUMBERING/LETTER SYSTEM .............................................................................................................................. 4 FORMATIONS ....................................................................................................................................................... 4 HOLES ..................................................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Visual Recognition of Multi-Agent Action by Stephen Sean Intille
    Visual Recognition of Multi-Agent Action by Stephen Sean Intille B.S.E., University of Pennsylvania (1992) S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1994) Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial ful®llment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 1999 c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1999. All rights reserved. Author ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Program in Media Arts and Sciences August 6, 1999 Certi®ed by ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Aaron F. Bobick Associate Professor of Computational Vision Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Thesis Supervisor Accepted by :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Stephen A. Benton Chairman, Departmental Committee on Graduate Students Program in Media Arts and Sciences 2 3 Visual Recognition of Multi-Agent Action by Stephen Sean Intille Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, on August 6, 1999, in partial ful®llment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Abstract Developing computer vision sensing systems that work robustly in everyday environments will require that the systems can recognize structured interaction between people and objects in the world. This document presents a new theory for the representation and recognition of coordinated multi-agent action from
    [Show full text]
  • Gaming and Strategic Choices to American Football
    International Journal of Mathematical and Computational Methods Arturo Yee et al. http://www.iaras.org/iaras/journals/ijmcm Gaming and strategic choices to American football ARTURO YEE1, EUNICE CAMPIRÁN2 AND MATÍAS ALVARADO3 1 Faculty of Informatics, Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa. Calle Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, CP 80013 Culiacán Sinaloa, México. 2 Department of Probability and Statistics, IIMAS, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Circuito Escolar s/n. Ciudad Universitaria, CP 04510, México City. 3 Computer Science Department, Center for Research and Advanced Studies. Av. Instituto Politécnico Nacional 2508, CP 07360, México City. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: - We propose American football (AF) modeling by means of a context-free grammar (CFG) that cores correct combination of players’ actions to algorithmic simulation. For strategic choices, the Nash equilibrium (NE) and the Pareto efficiency (PE) are used to select AF strategy profiles having better percentage to success games: results from game simulations show that the AF team with a coach who uses NE or PE wins more games than teams that not use strategic reasoning. The team using strategic reasoning has an advantage that ranges from 30% to 65%. Using a single NE, the corresponding advantage is approximately 60% on average. Using a single PE, the corresponding advantage is approximately 35% on average. Feeding simulations with National Football League (NFL) statistics for particular teams and specific players, results close-fit to the real games played by them. Moreover, statistics confidence intervals and credible intervals support conclusions. On the base of CFG modeling and use of statistics (history of teams and players), forecasting results on future games is settled.
    [Show full text]
  • A History of the Presentation of American Football in England and Germany
    FROM VIOLENCE TO PARTY: A HISTORY OF THE PRESENTATION OF AMERICAN FOOTBALL IN ENGLAND AND GERMANY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Lars Dzikus, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2005 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Melvin L. Adelman, Adviser Professor Sarah K. Fields Adviser Professor William J. Morgan College of Education ABSTRACT While scholars have widely discussed the cultural, economic, and political influence of the United States on Europe in general and Germany in particular, the realm of sports has received surprisingly little attention. This study ties in with the scholarly debate about Americanization and / or globalization that started in the first half the 1990s. It examines the presentation of American football in England from the 1890s through World War II as well as in Germany following the war to the present day. The study discusses what non-Americans wrote about football and what their countrymen and –women read about it. The study draws on English and German newspapers and magazines, particularly the London Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It also examines the role American military, radio, television, and movies played in the diffusion of American football. In the case of Germany, the researcher draws on extensive qualitative interviews with several of the “founding fathers” of American football in Germany as well as his own experiences in the sport. The work demonstrates that American football arrived in Germany on a field that had been prepared by a three-hundred-year process of imagining Amerika.
    [Show full text]
  • Play Type Recognition in Real-World Football Video
    Play Type Recognition in Real-World Football Video Sheng Chen, Zhongyuan Feng, Qingkai Lu, Behrooz Mahasseni, Trevor Fiez and Alan Fern, Sinisa Todorovic Oregon State University Abstract yond the capabilities of off-the-shelf computer vision tools, largely due to the huge diversity of football videos. The This paper presents a vision system for recognizing the videos have large variance in viewing angles/distances, shot sequence of plays in amateur videos of American football quality, weather/lighting conditions, the color/sizes of field games (e.g. offense, defense, kickoff, punt, etc). The sys- logos/markings, and the scene around the field, ranging tem is aimed at reducing user effort in annotating foot- from crowds, to players on the bench, to construction equip- ball videos, which are posted on a web service used by ment. The videos are typically captured by amateurs, and over 13,000 high school, college, and professional football exhibit motion blur, camera jitter, and large camera mo- teams. Recognizing football plays is particularly challeng- tion. Further, there is large variation in team strategies, ing in the context of such a web service, due to the huge formations, and uniforms. All this makes video rectifi- variations across videos, in terms of camera viewpoint, mo- cation, frame-references, and background detection rather tion, distance from the field, as well as amateur camerawork challenging, which are critical for existing approaches. quality, and lighting conditions, among other factors. Given Our primary goal is achieving robustness to such wide a sequence of videos, where each shows a particular play of variability, while also maintaining a reasonable runtime.
    [Show full text]
  • CVPR13 Pocket Guide
    Message from the General and Program Chairs Welcome to Portland, Oregon and the 26th IEEE Coordination Chair who was in charge of the interface Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern with TPMS. The ACs in turn used the results of a Recognition (CVPR). In addition to the main three- TPMS matching of papers to reviewers to help them day program of oral and poster presentations (in two determine the potential reviewers for each of their parallel tracks), CVPR 2013 has a number of co- assigned papers, from which the CMT system located events, including 22 workshops, 9 tutorials, automatically selected three non-conflicted reviewers and on-site demos and exhibits. In order to allow for per paper. Finally, extensive manual adjustments one-minute spotlight presentation of each poster, were made by the ACs and Program Chairs to achieve oral presentations have been shortened to 15 minutes better matches between the papers and reviewers each, but oral presenters now optionally get to under the workload constraints. In summary, the present a poster as well. critical task of matching papers to ACs and reviewers were made by the Program Chairs and ACs, with For this year’s main conference, we received 1816 support from the CMT and TPMS software. completed submissions to the conference, of which 1798 were fully reviewed. (The other papers were Reviewers were given five weeks to complete their either rejected for technical reasons or withdrawn reviews, at which time the ACs stepped back in to vet before review.) To select papers from these the reviews for quality (initiating discussions, where submissions, we invited 52 well-known vision necessary) before they were released to the authors.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Persuasive Power of Videogame Avatars on Health-Related Behaviours
    On the Persuasive Power of Videogame avatars on Health-related behaviours Oliver James Clark PhD 2019 On the persuasive power of videogame avatars on health-related behaviours Oliver James Clark A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Health, Psychology, and Social Change Manchester Metropolitan University 2019 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is their own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2019 The Manchester Metropolitan University and Oliver James Clark For Audrey, who never doubted for a moment. Acknowledgements I am incredibly grateful for having such a fantastic supervisory team; Thank you Jenny Cole, Sarah Grogan, and Niki Ray for the comments, suggestions, and encouragement, and for tolerating my single minded dedication to Markdown and LATEX; and Kevin Tan for the technical advice over the past three years. It has been a pleasure working with you all. Thank you to my examiners Professor Phillipa Diedrichs and Professor Marc Jones for thoroughly reading the thesis, providing incredibly helpful feedback, and for an excellent discussion, with Professor Sue Powell, during my Viva. Thanks to the Chatistician, Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti for the Reviewer-2 Special - this was invaluable! I also would like to thank the Technical Officer Gary Dicks for his support with getting my laboratory experiments off the ground and doing a fantastic job with the new labs.
    [Show full text]