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Global Discourse
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought
Volume 8, 2018 - Issue 4: Cultivating New Post-secular Political Space
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Research Article

Love your enemy? An aesthetic discourse analysis of self-transcendence in values-motivated altruism

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Pages 659-679 | Received 10 Aug 2018, Accepted 01 Aug 2018, Published online: 06 Sep 2018
 

ABSTRACT

Inter-disciplinary academic enquiry shares the challenge to explore the social and ethical applications of research into today’s globalised but increasingly complex world. Positive psychology examines how life can be well in this broader enquiry of the social and moral contexts of ‘individual’ happiness. In this it begins to embrace innovative, qualitative research methods alongside its earlier positivistic, scientific approach, in the social transition to enquire more inductively. This research therefore attempts two things. The substantive research explores how experiences of self-transcendence may emerge in the choice of altruistic values, to ‘love an enemy’, potentially at cost to personal ‘selfhood’ in pursuit of a well society. Secondly, it presents the innovative ‘aesthetic discourse analysis’ as a means to examine the motivational or moral impulse of personhood, where the self becomes ‘sensible’ to agentic change. It draws on Bakhtin’s use of genre, emotional intonation and chronotope to interrogate the ‘feltness’ of self-conscious motivation. In three focus groups, people who are all committed to the self-transcendent value to love the Other, converse with Others from different backgrounds and belief systems. The research discovers that lived experiences of self-transcendence co-occur with ontological and epistemological re-shaping of self-consciousness.

View responses to this article:
Carving a dialogical epistemology for investigating altruism: A reply to Mitchell and Eiroa–Orosa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A scientifically acceptable control group would not be possible, given that ‘otherness’ can never be eliminated. The level of homogeneity in this group was distinctly higher in terms of shared worldview and cultural experience, to offer potential comparisons.

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Eiroa-Orosa has received funding from the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014–2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 654808

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