Toombs and Merleau-Pontus on Phantom-Limb Syndrome and Intentionality

“Merleau-Ponty would argue that my inability to recall or re-imagine ‘walking’ can be understood in terms of bodily intentionality. For instance, he notes that the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’ is best explained in terms of the body’s involvement with the environment. The person who feels the phantom limb does so for as long as the body remains open to the types of actions for which the limb would be the center of it were still operative (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 76). Thus, my inability to re-imagine ‘walking’ might be understood in terms of a permanent change in bodily intentionality. My limbs are no longer open to the possibility of moving in a certain manner (i.e., in the mode of ‘walking’).

Sociality and the Gospel

"Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master."

Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 48-49.

The Faces of Religion

"Religion is an amazing phenomenon that plays contradictory roles in peoples lives. It can destroy or revitalize, put to sleep or awaken, enslave or emancipate, teach docility or teach revolt." ~Ali Sharyati

Cited from Leslie Hazelton, After the Prophet (New York: Doubleday, 2009)

Cornel West on the Permanance of Religion and Idolatry

"So we have to hold onto the liberal political, moral breakthrough and try to make the breakthrough on the economic level in terms of democratizing, but also acknowledge that Durkheim was actually more right than Weber, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Think about page 431. He says there's something eternal about worship and faith. And if you shift from God-talk, you could end up worshipping the market or its accomplishments and accoutrements. You can end up with idolatrous worship of a lot of profane things. It reminds one of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. You are going to worship something. What is it? Is it Kurtz and the ivory? That's Conrad, 1899, the critique of idolatry. Christians like myself say you must forever be vigilant in critiques of idolatry. Why? Because idolatry is shot through all of us. But you're going to treasure something. If you treasure something that pulls you out of yourself and makes you love more and sacrifice for justice, that's going to be better than the next Lexus that you get. There's no escape from the fiduciary dimension of being human."

Cornel West, "Dialog: Judith Butler and Cornel West" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 105-106.

Cornel West on Prophetic Religion

"I'm going to close with the notion of 'utopian interruptions.' What I'm talking about is always tied to failure. It's no accident that the figures that I invoke - Beckett has an aesthetic for failure, doesn't he? So does Chekhov. So does Kafka. That wonderful letter that Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, July 1938: 'You'll never understand the purity and the beauty of Kafka if you don't view him as a failure.' […] Prophetic religion is an individual and collective performative praxis of maladjustment to greed, fear, and bigotry. For prophetic religion the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Yet it is always tied to some failure - always. [...] because the powers-that-be are not just mighty, but they're very clever and they dilute and incorporate in very seductive ways - or sometimes they just kill you!"

Cornel West, "Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 99.

Judaism as Redemption from Teleology

"Arendt was clearly closer to Benjamin's counter-Messianic view. In that view, it was the suffering of the oppressed that flashed up during moments of emergency and that interrupted both homogeneous and teleological time. [...] Redemption itself is to be rethought as the exilic, without return, a disruption of teleological history and an opening to a convergent and interruptive set of temporalities. This is a messianism, perhaps secularized, that affirms the scattering of light, the exilic condition, as the nonteleological form that redemption now takes. This is a redemption, then, from teleological history."

Judith Butler, "Is Judaism Zionism?" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 81.

Judith Butler on Religion

"It makes a different kind of sense to refer to a secular Jew than to a secular Catholic; while both may be presumed to have departed from religious belief, there may be other forms of belonging that do not presume or require belief; secularization may well be one way that Jewish life continues as Jewish. We also make a mistake if religion becomes equated with belief, and belief is then tied to certain kinds of speculative claims about God […] That effort to distinguish the cognitive status of religious and nonreligious belief misses the fact that very often religion functions as a matrix of subject formation, an embedded framework for valuations, and a mode of belonging and embodied social practice."

Judith Butler, "Is Judaism Zionism?" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 72.

Agamben on Politics

“There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bareblife in an inclusive exclusion.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 8.

History within Minima Moralia

"The knowledge that in per-history the objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, indeed by virtual of annihilating individual qualities, without the reconciliation of general and particular - constructed in thought - ever yet being accomplished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with serene indifference he opts once again for liquidation of the particular. Nowhere in his work is the primacy of the whole doubted. The more questionable the transition from reflective isolation to glorified totality becomes in history as in Hegelian logic, the more eagerly philosophy, as the justification of what exists, attaches itself to the triumphal car of objective tendencies." (17)

"Hegel, in hypostasizing both bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual, did not truly carry through the dialectic between the two." (17)

"For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud." (17)

"The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture itself might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself... As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated." (55)

"The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death." (56)

"Dialectical thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means." (150)

"Stringency and totality, the bourgeois intellectual ideas of necessity and generality, do indeed circumscribe the formula of history, but for just this reason the constitution of society finds its precipitate in those great, immovable, lordly concepts against which dialectical criticism and practice are directed." (151)

"If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might ass that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside - what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic." (151)

"What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement." (151)

"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it." (219)

"but even if things have always been so, although neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the English colonial administration in India systematically burst the lungs of millions of people with gas, the eternity of horror nevertheless manifests itself in the fact that each of its new forms outdoes the old. What is constant is not an invariable quantity of suffering, but its progress towards hell: that is the meaning of the thesis of the intensification of antagonisms." (233-234)

"Not only in the development of forces of production but also in the increasing pressure of domination does quantity change into quality." (234)

"Horror consists in its always remaining the same - the persistence of 'pre-history' - but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces." (234)

"Auschwitz cannot be brought into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states as a mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of mind." (234)

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso Books, 2005).

The Concept of Enlightenment

"Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters." (1)

"Bacon... substituted belief for knowledge." (1)

"Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters." (2)

"Technology is the essence of this knowledge." (2)

"On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability." (3)

"For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion." (3)

"Enlightenment is totalitarian. Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism, the projection of subjective properties onto nature, as the basis of myth." (4)

"...number became enlightenment's canon." (4)

"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion: modern positivism consigns it to poetry." (4-5)

"But the myths which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products." (5)

"The single distinction between man's own existence and reality swallows us all others." (5)

"The awakening of the subject is bought with the recognition of power as the principle of all relationships." (5)

"in their mastery of nature, the creative God and the ordering mind are alike. Man's likeness to God consists in sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command. Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. he knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. Their 'in-itself' becomes 'for him.'" (6)

"Only when made in such an image does man attain the identity of the self which cannot be lost in identification with the other but takes possession of itself once and for all as an impenetrable mask." (6)

"Magic like science is concerned with ends, but it pursues them through mimesis, not through an increasing distance from the object." (7)

"receiving all its subject matter from myths, in order to destroy them, it falls under the spell of myth. It seeks to escape the trial of fate and retribution by itself exacting retribution on that trial." (8)

"The doctrine that action equals reaction continued to maintain the power of repetition over existence long after humankind has shed the illusion that, by repetition, it could identify itself with repeated existence and so escape its power. But the more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now objectified in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects." (8)

"Enlightenment dissolves away the injustice of the old inequality of unmediated mastery, but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation, by relating every existing thing to every other." (8)

"The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market." (9)

"The horde, a term which doubtless is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive egalite, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals." (9)

"Under the leveling rule of abstraction , which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the 'herd', which Hegel identified as the outcome of enlightenment." (9)

"The self which learned about order and subordination through the subjugation of the world soon equated truth in general with classifying thought, without whose fixed distinctions it cannot exist. Along with mimetic magic it tabooed the knowledge which really apprehends the object." (10)

"What the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link. The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness. The doubling of nature... springs from human fear, the expression of which becomes its explanation." (10)

"The concept... a product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only be becoming what it is not." (11)

"But this dialectic remains powerless as long as it emerges from the cry of terror, which is the doubling, the mere tautology of terror itself." (11)

"Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo." (11)

"The shaman wards off a danger with its likeness. Equivalence is his instrument; and equivalence regulates punishment and reward within civilization... The step from chaos to civilization... changed nothing in the principle of equivalence. Indeed, human beings atoned for this very step by worshiping that to which previously, like all other creatures, they had been merely subjected... Now equivalence itself becomes a fetish." (12)

"With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language... As sign, language must resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it." (12-13)

"With advancing enlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what already is... Science, in it neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system of isolated signs devoid of any intention transcending the system; it becomes the game which mathematicians have long since proudly declared their activity to be." (13)

"Nature is no longer to be influenced by likeness but mastered through work." (13)

"As an expression of totality art claims the dignity of the absolute." (14)

"But faith is a privative concept: it is abolished as faith it is does not continuously assert either its opposition to knowledge or its agreement with it. In being dependent on the limits set to knowledge, it is itself limited." (14)

"Because faith is unavoidably tied to knowledge as its friend or foe, faith perpetuates the split in the struggle to overcome knowledge: its fanaticism is the mark of its untruth, the objective admission that anyone who only believes for that reason no longer believes. Bad conscience is second nature to it." (14)

"Faith repeatedly shows itself of the same stamp as the world history it would like to command; indeed, in the modern period it has become that history's preferred means, its special ruse." (15)

Division of labor and "a means of enforcing the particular interest." (16)

"What is done to all by the few always takes the form of the subduing of individuals by the many: the oppression of society always bears the features of oppression by a collective." (16)

"Language itself endowed what it expressed, the conditions of domination, with the universality it had acquired as the means of intercourse in civil society." (16)

"The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself... Enlightenment finally devoured not only symbols but also their successors, universal concepts, and left nothing of metaphysics behind except the abstract fear of the collective from which it had sprung." (17)

the link between name and essence (17)

"dialectic discloses each image as script... language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs. With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it." (18)

"In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mystical. It equates thought with mathematics." (18)

"Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine." (19)

"Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought." (19)

"There is no being in the world that knowledge cannot penetrate, but what can be penetrated by knowledge is not being." (19)

"The equation of mind and world is finally resolved, but only in the sense that both sides cancel out. The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus condemns the world to be its own measure." (20)

"Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand. Instead of such negation, mathematical formalism, whose medium, number, is the most actual form of the immediate, arrests thought at mere immediacy." (20)

"industrialism makes souls into things...The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, descent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures." (21)

"In the judgment of enlightenment as of Protestantism, those who entrust themselves directly to life, without any rational reference to self-preservation, revert to the realm of prehistory." (22)

"finally, the transcendental subject of knowledge, as the last reminder of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic mechanisms of order" (23)

"Positivism, which finally did not shrink from laying hands on the idlest fancy of all, thought itself, eliminated the last intervening agency between individual action and the social norm." (23)

"reason itself has become merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus." (23)

"the expulsion of thought from logic ratifies in the lecture hall the reification of human beings in factory and office." (23)

"The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape. The oldest fear, that of losing one's own name, is being fulfilled. For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger." (24)

"pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-contempt." (24)

"the control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life." (24)

"Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature and its subjugation to the self." (25)

"Under the compulsion of power, human labor has always led away from myth and, under power, has always fallen back under its spell." (25)

"Narcotic intoxication... is one of the oldest social transactions mediating between self-preservation and self-annihilation, an attempt by the self to survive itself." (26)

"The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power." (26)

Odysseus... (26-27)

Allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment (27)

Hegel and the Master-Slave Dialectic (27)

"The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses." (27)

"The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression." (28)

"Through the mediation of total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society, the principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity." (29)

"The powerlessness of the workers is not merely a ruse of the rulers but the logical consequence of industrial society, into which the efforts to escape it have finally transformed the ancient concept of fate." (29)

"The instruments of power - language, weapons, and finally machines - which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone." (29)

"On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself, and machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them." (29)

Poverty (30)

"Enlightenment is more than enlightenment, it is made audible in its estrangement... In the mastery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature persists." (31)

"Each advance of civilization has renewed not only mastery but also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase in the means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that prospect depends on the concept." (32)

"Through this remembrance of nature within the subject, a remembrance which contains the unrecognized truth of all culture, enlightenment is opposed in principle to power, and even in the time of Vanini the call to hold back enlightenment was uttered less from fear of exact science than from hatred of licentious thought, which had escaped the spell of nature by confessing itself to be nature's own dread of itself." (32)

"...confusing freedom with the business of self-preservation." (32)

"By sacrificing thought, which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization." (33)

"But a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify." (33)

"In multiplying violence through the mediation of the market, the bourgeois economy has also multiplied its things and its forces to the point where not merely kings or even the bourgeois are sufficient to administrate them: all human beings are needed." (33)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Quotes from Horkheimer and Adorno's Prefaces

"The conflicts in the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was at that time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in the face of great historical trend." (xi)

"Our prognosis regarding the associated lapse from enlightenment into positivism, into myth of that which is the case, and finally of the identity of intelligence and hostility to mind, has been overwhelmingly confirmed." (xii)

"What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism." (xiv)

"If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history." (xiv-xv)

"Today, however, motorized history is rushing ahead of such intellectual developments, and the official spokesmen, who have other concerns, are liquidating the theory to which they owe their place in the sun before it has time to prostitute itself completely." (xv)

"freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking" (xvi)

"False clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts." (xvii)

"The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers." (xvii)

"While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them." (xvii)

"The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once." (xvii)

"That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ideological curtain, within the social whole, behind which real doom is gathering, does matter." (xviii)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Quotes from Horkheimer and Adorno's Preface

"The conflicts in the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was at that time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before progress, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in the face of great historical trend."

"Our prognosis regarding the associated lapse from enlightenment into positivism, into myth of that which is the case, and finally of the identity of intelligence and hostility to mind, has been overwhelmingly confirmed."

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "Preface to the 1969 Edition" in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xi-xii.

Merleau-Ponty’s Praise of Praxis

“What Marx calls praxis is the meaning which appears spontaneously at the intersection of the actions by which man organizes his relationship with nature and with others.” 

Eloge de la philosophie (Gallimard, 1953), p. 69. In Praise of Philosophy, trans. James E. Edie and John Wild (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1963).

Simone de Beauvoir on Narcissism

 “In fact, narcissism is a well-defined process of alienation: the self is posited as an absolute end, and the subject escapes itself in it… What is true is that circumstances invite women more than men to turn toward self and to dedicate her love to herself. All love demands the duality of a subject and an object. Woman is led to narcissism by two convergent paths… in her functions as wife, mother, and housewife, she is not recognized in her singularity. Man’s truth is in the houses he builds, the forests he clears, the patients he cures: not being able to accomplish herself in projects and aims, woman attempts to grasp herself in the immanence of her person… she gives herself sovereign importance because no important object is accessible to her.” (667)

“If she can put herself forward in her own desires, it is because since childhood she has seen herself as an object. Her education has encouraged her to alienate herself wholly in her body.” (667-668)

“In truth, it is not possible to be for self positively Other and grasp oneself as object in the light of consciousness. Doubling is only dreamed… It is above all in woman that the reflection allows itself to be assimilated to the self. Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanence…” (668-669)

“We know, for example, how attached women are to their childhood memories; women’s literature make its clear… They are nostalgic for this period when they felt their father’s beneficent and imposing hand on their head while tasting the joys of independence; protected and justified by adults, they were autonomous individuals with a free future opening before them: now, however, they are poorly protected by marriage and love and have become servants or objects, to be imprisoned in the present… She returns emotionally to this younger sister whose freedom, demands, and sovereignty she abdicated and whom she more or less betrayed.” (671)

“The character she portrays is more of less coherent and original according to her intelligence, obstinacy, and depth of alienation. Some women just randomly put together a few sparse and mismatched traits; others systematically create a figure whose role they consistently play…” (672)

“But above all she has not realized herself in her life, the heroine cherished by the narcissist is merely an imaginary character; her unity does not come from the concrete world: it is a hidden principle, a kind of ‘strength,’ ‘virtue’ as obscure as phlogistonism… woman, in her own eyes, adopts the tragic hero’s need to be governed by destiny. Her whole life is transfigured into a sacred drama.” (674)

“The woman in love quickly forgets herself; but many women are incapable of real love, precisely because they never forget themselves.” (675)

“the caricature of action… if she cannot take action, the woman invents substitutes for action; the theater represents a privileged substitute for some women.” (676)

“The stubborn narcissist will be as limited in art as in love because she does not know how to give herself.” (677)

“Many women imbued with a feeling of superiority, however, are not able to show it to the world; their ambition will thus be to us a man whom they convince of their worth as their means to intervention; they do not aim for specific values through free projects; they want to attach readymade values to their egos; they will thus turn – by becoming muses, inspiration, and stimulation – to those who hold influence and glory in the hope of being identified with them.” (677)

“Her misfortune is that, in spite of all her bad faith, she is aware of this nothingness. There cannot be a real relationship between an individual and his double, because this double does not exist. The woman narcissist suffers a radical failure. She cannot grasp herself as a totality, as plentitude; she cannot maintain the illusion of being in itself – for itself. Her solitude, like that of every human being, is felt as contingence and abandonment. And this is why – unless there is a conversion – she is condemned to hide relentlessly from herself in crowds, noise, and others. It would be a grave error to believe that in choosing herself as the supreme end, she escapes dependence: on the contrary, she dooms herself to the most severe slavery; she does not make the most of her freedom, she makes herself an endangered object in the world an in foreign consciousnesses.” (681)

“if she sought recognition by others’ freedom while also recognizing that freedom as an end through activity, she would cease to be narcissistic. The paradox of her attitude is that she demands to be valued by a world to which she denies all value, since she alone counts in her own eyes.“ (682)

Beauvoir and History

"We have already posited that when two human categories find themselves face-to-face, each one wants to impose its sovereignty on the other; if both hold to this claim equally, a reciprocal relationship is created, either hostile or friendly, but always tense. if one of the two has an advantage over the other, that one prevails and works to maintain the relationship by oppression." (71)

"it was man who controlled the balance between reproduction and production... There are female animals that derive total autonomy from motherhood; so why has woman not been able to make a pedestal for herself from it?... The reason for this is that humanity is not a simple natural species: it does not seek to survive as a species; its project is not stagnation: it seek to surpass itself." (72-73)

"to give birth and to breast-feed are not activities but natural functions; they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she passively submits to her biological destiny... Man's case is radically different. He does not provide for the group in the way worker bees do, by a simple vital process, but rather by acts that transcend his animal condition." (73)

"to appropriate the world's treasurers, he annexes the world itself. Through such actions he tests his own power; he posits ends and projects paths to them: he realizes himself as existent. To maintain himself, he creates; he spills over the present and opens up the future... This pride is still apparent today when he builds a dam, a skyscraper, or an atomic reactor. he has not only worked to preserve the given world: he has burst through its borders; he has laid the ground for a new future." (73)

"This is how he brilliantly proves that life is not the supreme value for man but that it must serve ends far greater than itself. The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills." (74)

"By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition... in serving the species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments, invents and forges the future." (74)

"Certain passages where Hegel's dialectic describes the relationship of master to slave would apply far better to the relationship of man to woman." (74)

"Hegel's definition applies singularly to her. 'The other [consciousness] is the dependent consciousness for which essential reality is animal life, that is, life given by another entity.'" (74)

"The female, more than the male, is prey to the species; humanity has always tried to escape from its species' destiny; with the invention of the tool, maintenance of life became activity and project for man, while motherhood left woman riveted to her body like the animal. it is because humanity puts itself into question in its being - that is, values reasons for living over life - that man has set himself as master over woman; man's project is not to repeat himself in time: it is to reign over the instant and to forge the future." (75)

"in the alienation process mentioned before, the clan grasps itself in this territory in the guise of an objective and concrete figure; through the permanence of the land, the clan thus realizes itself as a unity whose identity persists throughout the passage of time." (77)

"The community conceives of its unity and wills its existence beyond the present: it sees itself in its children, it recognizes them as its own, and it accomplishes and surpasses itself through them." (77)

"It is in women that the whole of foreign Nature is concentrated... When the woman's role grows, she comes to occupy nearly the whole region of the Other." (79)

"But in reality this golden age of Woman is only a myth. To say that woman was the Other is to say that a relationship of reciprocity between the sexes did not exist... she was never a peer for man; her power asserted itself beyond human rule: she was thus outside of this rule." (80)

"Insofar as woman is considered the absolute Other, that is - whatever magic powers she has - as the inessential, it is precisely impossible to regard her as another subject. Women have thus never constituted a separate group that posited itself for-itself before a male group; they have never had a direct or autonomous relationship with men." (80)

"But as powerful as she may appear, she is defined through notions created by the male consciousness. All of the idols invented by man, however terrifying he may have made them, are in fact dependent upon him, and this is why he is able to destroy them." (82)

"And in fact, even when man grasps himself as given, passive, and subject to the vagaries of rain and sun, he still realizes himself as transcendence, as project; already, spirit and will assert themselves within him against life's confusion and contingencies." (82)

"man wishes to possess what he is not; he unites himself to what appears to him to be Other than himself." (83)

"he relegates them to their Olympian heaven and keeps the terrestrial domain for himself; the great Pan begins to fade at the first sound of his hammer, and man's reign begins... cause and effect" (84)

"alterity is the same as negation, thus Evil." (88)

Beauvoir's Criticism of Historical Materialism and Engels

"Humanity is not an animal species: it is a historical reality. Human society is an anti-physis: it does not passively submit to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it." (62)

"The discovery of bronze enabled man, tested by hard and productive work, to find himself as creator, dominating nature; no longer afraid of nature, having overcome resistance, he dares to grasp himself as autonomous activity and to accomplish himself in his singularity. But this accomplishment would never have been realized if man had not originally wanted it; the lesson of labor is not inscribed in a passive subject: the subject forged and conquered himself in forging his tools and conquering the earth... there had to be another original tendency in man: in the preceding chapter we said that the existent can only succeed in grasping himself by alienating himself; he searches for himself through the world, in the guise of a foreign figure he makes his own." (65)

"In these riches of his, man finds himself because he lost himself in them: it is understandable then that he can attribute to them an importance as basic as that of his life itself. Thus man's interest in his property becomes an intelligible relationship. But clearly the tool alone is not enough to explain it; the whole attitude of the tool-armed man must be grasped, an attitude that implies an ontological infrastructure." (65)

"Because man is transcendence and ambition, he projects new demands with each new tool... Woman's powerlessness brought about her ruin because man apprehended her through a project of enrichment and expansion." (66)

"If the original relation between man and his peers had been exclusively one of friendship, one could not account for any kind of enslavement: this phenomenon is a consequence of the imperialism of human consciousness, which seeks to match its sovereignty objectively. Had there not been in human consciousness both the original category of the Other and an original claim to domination over the Other, the discovery of the bronze tool could not have brought about woman's oppression." (66)

"A truly socialist ethic - one that seeks justice without restraining liberty, one that imposes responsibilities on individuals but without abolishing individual freedom - will find itself most uncomfortable with problems posed by woman's condition." (67)

"To demand for woman all the rights, all the possibilities of the human being in general does not mean one must be blind to her singular situation. To know this situation, it is necessary to go beyond historical materialism which only sees man and woman as economic entities." (67-68)

"if they are not incorporated into the whole of human reality, sexuality and technology of themselves will fail to explain anything... the body, sexual life, and technology exist concretely for man only insofar as he grasps them from the overall perspective of his existence. The value of muscular strength, the phallus, and the tool can only be defined in a world of values: it is driven by the fundamental project of the existent transcending itself toward being." (68)

Beauvoir on Pyschoanalysis and Gender

"All psychoanalysts systematically refuse the idea of choice and its corollary, the notion of value; and herein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system." (55)

"The existent is a sexed body; in its relations with other existents that are also sexed bodies, sexuality is thus always involved; but as the body and sexuality are concrete expressions of existence, it is also from here that their significance can be ascertained: without this perspective, psyschoanalysis takes unexplained facts for granted... Sexuality must not be taken as an irreducible given; the existent possesses a more primary 'quest for being'; sexuality is only one of these aspects." (55)

"Work, war, play, and art define ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to any others; they bring to light features that impinge on those that sexuality reveals; it is both through them and through these erotic experiences that the individual chooses himself." (56)

"It is impossible to account for this without starting from an existential fact: the subject's tendency toward alienation; the anxiety of his freedom leads the subject to search for himself in things, which is a way to flee from himself... Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. (57)

"For us woman is defined as a human being in search of values within a world of values, a world where it is indispensable to understand the economic and social structure; we will study her from an existential point of view, taking into account her total situation." (61)

Simone de Beauvoir, "The Pyschoanalytical Point of View" in The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malvany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

Claude Lefort on Religion

"any society which forgets its religious basis is laboring under the illusion of pure-immanence."

Claude Lefort, "The Permanence of the Theologico-Political," in Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 224.

Jürgen Habermas on the state of the Political

"In the welfare state democracies of the latter half of the twentieth century, politics was still able to wield a steering influence on the diverging subsystems; it could still counterbalance tendencies toward social disintegration. ,' politics could succeed in this effort within the framework of the nation state. Thus under the conditions of 'embedded capitalism Today, under conditions of globalized capitalism, the political capacities for protecting social integration are becoming dangerously restricted."

Jürgen Habermas, "The Political": The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology, in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vananthwerpen (New York: COlumbia University Press, 2011), p. 15.

Christmas Eve Candleight Sermon, 2017

John 1:1-13

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴ in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷ He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸ He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹ The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Sermon:

          I wonder how many of you remember the show The West Wing? Do we have any fans in here? I’ll admit that I didn’t watch the show relentlessly. I enjoyed it only on occasion. Somehow, however, I feel like this may have been a mistake. The show had a lot to offer and it was, perhaps, a reflection of a better, more civil, time in American politics. But there’s one episode that I want to bring back to our memories here tonight. It’s episode 10 from season 1, which was entitled In Excelsis Deo. In this episode, Toby - the White House Communications Director – gets a call from the D.C. police who are looking for someone to identify a dead homeless man. It turns out the man, a Korean War veteran, was wearing a coat that Toby donated to Goodwill, that Toby had left his business card in. The event stays with him, and he tracks down the veteran’s next of kin. The only relative he can find is a brother, also homeless. Using the influence of the president's office, he arranges a military funeral at Arlington. President Bartlet is informed about Toby’s transgression, but can only muster a limited amount indignation and jocularly asks if the country is still in NATO. The rest of the president's staff is concerned that this could create precedent for other veterans to come forward, a concern to which Toby responds, "I can only hope, sir." After this exchange of words, Toby and Mrs. Landingham, the President’s secretary, attend the funeral at Arlington. It’s a powerful moment in television history that powerfully discloses the dishonor we share in our society’s indifference to homeless veterans.

          As Christians, we often get in the habit of assuming that things will improve if we just recognize that other people are created in the image of God – that they are just as human as we are. It’s a popular idea and it even has secular forms. In philosophy, many assume that the foundation of ethics should rest in empathy – our basic recognition of another’s humanity and the feelings, motivations, and experiences that they might be undergoing. And yet, I cannot help but wonder if this idea is insufficient. In every major city around the world, people walk by homeless people. Yes, we often try to avoid looking at them, yet the vast majority of people who walk by are simply unaffected; or, perhaps, more tellingly disgusted. Is this simply an act of not seeing another person as created in the image of God? Or to ask the question in another way, does the schoolyard bully simply fail to recognize that his victims are just like him?

Bullies don’t dehumanize their targets. They revel in the fact that they are human. As Paul Bloom stated in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.”[1] Humanity’s worst acts of violence often carry a level of empathy – a recognition of another, but an ‘other’ as an enemy or target, rather than the object of sympathy or altruism. Toby’s misuse of presidential power to arrange an honor guard and burial for a homeless veteran wasn’t just an act of seeing the homeless man as human, it was an act that required something more than that. It required selflessness and sympathy – which is an ethical intention.

          This evening’s passage from the first chapter of John begins with the famous phrase, “In the beginning was the Word”. It’s a scripture that is often called a poetic prologue because it beautifully foreshadows the coming narrative. It’s a dramatic and immediate announcement regarding the significance of the following narrative and the meaning behind the life of Jesus. Its scope is unparalleled because it isn’t just concerned with something like the forgiveness of our sins, but the redemption of the entire cosmos, which encompasses everything – not just the world we experience.

          So, when we hear this imagery of a light that cannot be overcome by darkness we are hearing about something truly magnificent. When John tells us that Jesus, “was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him” we are being told that humanity failed to understand the significance of Jesus’ life. Jesus’ own disciples failed to understand! It was only after his death and resurrection that comprehension began to set in. Jesus brought us a revolution not of swords, or guns, or violence, but a revolution of humanity – of ourselves. He offers us more than we can ever be on our own.

          Our world, much of it at least, is built on darkness. Nation states and even tribes are formed out of our collective commitments to use force to dominate, protect ourselves, or keep the balance. In ancient times, nearly all civilizations practiced human sacrifice as a means of alleviating the buildup of tension within a society. By finding and expelling a scapegoat, societies could expel their frustrations. It’s a habit that we haven’t escaped even if we’ve found more ‘civilized’ ways to directing our anger. We still point fingers at those we don’t like or don’t care to understand. Similarly, we still show indifference to those who may be too weak to help themselves. We rarely turn the other cheek, but we often turn our eyes away from that to which we would rather just be indifferent – the foreigner, the orphan, the elderly, the poor, and sometimes even the veteran. Our species is in a great need of healing.

          And it is at precisely this point where the Apostle John has something powerful to say to us. Light doesn’t just shine in this world, it cannot be overcome by the darkness. It enlightens all who see it and seek to follow it. Everyone who receives Jesus, who believes in his name, can be enlightened by his example. Jesus offers us the opportunity to become children of God – people whose intentions and desires aren’t just shaped by their families, histories, or fragile constitutions but by the example of God himself who came to us to illustrate what it means to truly be a Human Being – to truly live according to God’s will. As Walter Wink writes in Only Jesus,

"And this is the revelation: God is HUMAN... It is the great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can only dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in God's image and likeness - which is to say, we are capable of becoming human."[2]

To put it another way, Jesus alone is truly a Human Being – in the sense that he alone perfectly reflects human nature as it is intended to be. The rest of us are broken. We are, together, Human Becomings more than Human Being. We aren’t stagnant or stationary creatures. Our natures aren’t fixed. We can change and grow. And yes, we can be touched by God’s in a way that can be truly transformational. We can be touched by the light that inhabits a feeding trough and be thoroughly moved by it.

          That’s the powerful thing about the Gospel. It turns our preconceptions upside down. The creator of the universe wasn’t born in a seat of power. His name wasn’t on the lips of the rich and famous. He was born into a distant, poor, overcrowded, and oppressed nation full of turmoil. He was rejected by his own people and killed by those he came to save – all of us. And in the process of giving himself up, he revealed something about each of us – our great need, our sin, our failures to truly be who God intended us to be.

          And it’s in the tinder moments when everything feels like it’s bearing down on us, when it feels like we’re at a loss, that the Christmas message come pounding on the doors of our hearts. Choirs of angels and the tendrils of guilt simultaneously compel us to recognize that our ideas might be wrong and our actions weak. The birth of Jesus announces that God acts to save us from our own failings. When things seem dark the bright light of the heavenly hosts flies in to offer us the chance to participate in something better. So, let each of us embrace this moment and let the Christmas spirit change our hearts and transform us into the kinds of humans we are truly meant to be. Amen.

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[1] Paul Bloom, “Beastly: Perpetrators of violence, we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse.” The New Yorker, November 27^th, 2017, p. 75.

[2] Walter Wink, Only Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human (Image, 2014), p. 102.