Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values: Truth, Language, and Desire

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This volume presents a theoretical defense of the potential of ordinary individuals to construct values and through them to become self-empowering, responsible participants in a democratic community. Rather than conceiving of power as domination, the author identifies true power as self-empowerment, a notion based on self-construction. He proposes the vision of an authentically free self filled with a compassion that is a composite of reason and feeling. Such a composite self does not consciously manipulate language, truth, and desire to dominate and subordinate other individuals, but uses them to construct values and norms that can enrich others. To support his argument the author draws on both classical and contemporary philosophers, as well as on literary sources.

Reviews

"Kiros' Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values provides a healthy antidote to postmodern deconstructions of the self and subjectivity, as well as all forms of cultural pessimism and those theories that merely stress domination at the expense of human emancipation and self-development. Kiros, by contrast, provides a philosophically original and strong defense of the construction of human values and selfhood guided by values of emancipation and self-development. He also nicely balances the personal and the political, and the projects of individual and social emancipation and development."-Douglas Kellner George Kellner Chair in the Philosophy of Education University of California, Los Angeles
"Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values: Truth, Language, and Desire develops a political theory that is rooted fundamentally in an admirable ethical concern. Dr. Kiros analyzes the relations between self-empowerment and domination. Like his earlier work, this book displays a substantial philosophical intelligence, shaped both by a wide inter-disciplinary reading and by a deep humanitarian concern."-K. Anthony Appiah Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy Harvard University
"Teodros Kiros' seminal study of Habermas, Foucault, Borges, Dostoyevsky, and Thomas Mann is a pleasure to read. Kiros makes theory into an erotic catharsis that informs our everyday sensibility with a reasoned critique of power and domination. His rationality of the heart provides a cathexis among specialized disciplines that sublates many of their best insights, thereby creating a critical theory that is simultaneously appropriation and transcendence."-George Katsiaficas Professor, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, Massachusetts Author of the Subversion of Politics
"This wide-ranging book, intelligent and clear, challenges both the mind and the heart."-Stephen Eric Bronner Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature Rutgers University
The book's project of exploring the philosophical possibility of social critique and moral progress is admirable. Though the conditions under which people become critical, autonomous thinkers remain to be understood fully, we would do well to start here.-New Political Science
"The book's project of exploring the philosophical possibility of social critique and moral progress is admirable. Though the conditions under which people become critical, autonomous thinkers remain to be understood fully, we would do well to start here."-New Political Science

Author Bio

TEODROS KIROS is Master Lecturer in Philosophy at Suffolk University and Associate-in-Residence in the Department of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University. He is the author of Toward the Construction of a Theory of Political Action: Antonio Gramsci (1985), Moral Philosophy and Development: The Human Condition in Africa (1992), and numerous journal articles. He is an editor of New Political Science and co-editor of The Promise of Multiculturalism (1998).