Autumn Sandeen pointed out the following on Pam’s House Blend.
http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/14246/thanksgiving-week-thankfulness-for-pam
As a left wing anarcha-feminist I tend to not spend much time in cultural feminist land as I really do not like hanging out where I am considered down by birth. Feminism, even Lesbian as in LGBT/T Feminism offers me enough space where my very humanity is not held up to abuse or the very legitimacy of my existence questioned.
I have barred certain people of the HBS political identity from posting here as they are abusive of people with transgenderism. Racists, homophobes, religious ideologues and right wingers are not welcome here. So if you are a follower of A Room of Our Own and think you will be able to turn this post into a forum for your bigotry… Think again..
My take on things may be a bit different than the sisters who run Questioning Transphobia as our experiences are different and so is our language. But, even if I put things differently from them or for that matter from Julia Serano, I’m fairly certain that we are seeing the same bigotry standing in opposition to it.
The piece of verbal diarrhea I am referring to may be found at:
http://aroomofourown.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/no-such-thing-as-a-transsexual/
It is by Margaret Jamison.
I have been out for over 40 years and an activist longer than that. I have watched the history of the movements from within those movements. I have seen their rise and fall, the internal wars that often destroyed them.
The loudest and most vicious forms of anti-transsexual bigotry have often been reflective of what I see as the worst tendencies within the various movements. Julia Serano titled her book “Whipping Girl” and put forth the proposition that transphobia is misogyny directed towards a convenient scapegoat.
Within the early feminist movement there was another tendency. Women who worked the hardest and were among the most dedicated as well as talented were seen as trying to rise above the other women. Some of us who were in the feminist/lesbian movements in those early days did what people with transsexualism have always done. We threw ourselves into that movement whole heartedly, working harder than anyone else. This was because we were raised thinking ourselves to be inferior and never good enough therefore we felt we had to prove our worth by working harder than anyone else.
Over compensation for poor self image. No matter how it gets directed. In one sister it might mean thousands of dollars worth of plastic surgery, another constant schooling and the pursuit of the Ph.D. Or being the best feminist one could possibly be.
There was a sister named Beth Elliott, in the Bay Area. She was a member of Daughters of Bilitis. She had the honor of being the first sister I know of who was publicly trashed first in “It Ain’t Me Babe” and later by Robin Morgan.
I didn’t understand it at first. But over the years I learned how Cointelpro worked and sowed seeds of destruction within various progressive groups by attacking people who were dedicated hard workers. Take down one and destroy her or him and you have not only destroyed an individual but any who share a common trait with the person destroyed.
Turn the attacking and defending of the individual into a factional split and the organization is destroyed. It doesn’t matter if the individual was innocent of every charge, fictitious charges; lies told loudly enough in a practice called “bad jacketing” can tear an organization, indeed a movement apart.
I can’t say for sure that what happened to Beth was Cointelpro. It doesn’t matter because even if it wasn’t, the result was the same. One more element in the destruction of the first Lesbian Organization promoting lesbian liberation..
Oddly the charges leveled against Beth and outlined in her book Mirrors: Portrait of a Lesbian Transsexual became the script for every bit of filth that could be leveled at women of a transsexual history by self proclaimed radical feminists and lesbian feminists.
A few years later Sandy Stone, recording engineer for Olivia Records, a lesbian music collective was hit with similar if somewhat different charges setting off a back and forth war of words within the feminist and lesbian feminist press regarding the legitimacy of women of a transsexual history.
Then Janice Raymond dropped her bigoted polemic, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Previous attacks had often been directed at those sisters who were closest to the socially acceptable feminine stereotypes or who were in touch with their sexiness and embraced their sexy female side leaving those of us who were good feminists in our jeans and movement t-shirts feeling safe. Raymond changed all that.
Now those of us who were good feminists, working doing leaflet layout and production, petition signature collecting and all the grunt work of the feminist movement were suddenly as bad as our sisters who were enjoying being sex positive heterosexual women during an era far less uptight than the present.
Things I wish we knew or thought about then that we know now. Raymond was a former Catholic nun and her mentor Mary Daly was originally a professor of theology who became involved in some pretty weird cult like magical thinking regarding theories of hidden matriarchal cultures.
The reactionary cultural feminism that had first stirred with Jane Alpert’s “Mother Right” and was embraced by Robin Morgan, who coincidentally led the lynch mob attack on Beth Elliott. (Morgan’s side of it can be found in Going too Far). Alpert laid out a form of binary gender essentialism that posited the same sort of black and white binary innateness one found in the traditional patriarchal bullshit that ordained the role of women as inferior to men.
It was seriously reactionary at a time when so much of feminism was based on the overlapping abilities and traits of men and women.
Long before GID and the million post-modern word games transsexual and transgender people play now people with transsexualism and transgenderism used that overlapping of traits to argue that maleness and femaleness were a continuum rather than a binary and that we were simply more predominately at the end not indicated by our at birth sex assignment.
But back to Daly and Raymond. Their Catholicism is the source of their ideology not feminism. I may blend anarchism and Marxist class consciousness with my feminism but they had to do an even bigger trick, that is to say they had to build their feminism on a foundation of misogyny.
Raymond’s position reflects that form of Christo-fascism that I first saw at 14 when the priest my mother sent me to for counseling basically told me that I would have to live my life in total denial of what I was or face an eternity in hell. That I couldn’t even think or fantasize about something so intrinsic to my being that I would discard family and risk a life of social ostracism to be. I was born with transsexualism. That was something I can not change.
Yet both the priests and the Ramondites would have me commit suicide either physically or by repression by denying me the legitimacy of my being. This is a denial of my humanity, a form of abuse so severe as to be unacceptable when directed at groups based on race or ethnicity or for that matter when directed at gays or lesbians.
It becomes far more egregious when a lesbian or gay man or for that matter someone claiming to be feminist starts attacking transsexual or transgender people. It is almost as though those doing the attacking are unaware of the real basis for those attacks and how it can be traced back to a chapter in the Bible that is filled with widely ignored rules.
I am speaking of Deuteronomy 22: 5 (King James Bible)

“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.”
Now most gay and lesbian people as well as most feminists have questioned the manner in which these ancient books of mythology have been used as tools of oppression. One does not have to look very hard to see the Bible as the source of both homophobia and misogyny.

However, the label of abomination is particularly harsh and is followed if memory serves me correctly with the part about how our blood should be upon us suggesting that any manner of violence including murder is justified.

When one listens to the vile and often contradictory slander that is laid upon transsexual and transgender people by bigots like the woman at AROOO one has to ask exactly what TS/TG folks are supposed to do?

We are attacked if we manage to get an education and develop a career. We are attacked if our educational opportunities in childhood were destroyed and we only managed to do sex work.

We are attacked for getting breast implants even though they were not developed specifically for us and the majority of women getting them were assigned female at birth. The excuse for not attacking natal females is that they get them due to having a flawed body image since male dominated media regularly shows ample breasted women as sexy and glamorous.
Ahh, but that is different. Actually it is not. TS/TG people are immersed in the same cultural soup as normborns.

TS/TG people both T to F and T to M can be either straight or gay/lesbian. Some are bisexual yet it often seems that the only form of sex that is acceptable to the bigots is asexuality and even that is probably reason for condemnation. Even self pleasuring is suspect in spite of there being feminist run businesses merchandising sex toys for women including Smitten Kitten and Good Vibrations.

If we get SRS we are mutilated men (or women as the case may be). If not we are men in dresses of which there is no T to M equivalent.

One of the nastiest rejoinders is the one that directs us to remain as we were assigned no matter how miserable we are and to fight sexism and the gender binary from our originally assigned sex. Now I opposed the draft back in the 1960s and as an anarcha-feminist I find the very idea that someone else should be required to fight a war for someone else’s cause questionable at best.

At worst it is like demanding that gay and lesbian people have reparative therapy and live as straight working to end the tyranny of the patriarchal oppression of women in marriage by changing it in a way so that gays and lesbians will no longer have to be gay or lesbian to find relationships where they are equally respected partners. Oh and BTW erase homosexuality.
We have progressed far beyond that, besides Audre Lorde gave us the tagline about how the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Anarchists do not demand others sacrifice their lives and pursuit of happiness to fight ill defined quixotic battles. Existentially that form of behavior is ethically questionable. It is more characteristic of hate groups than liberation movements.

I saw the purity purges on the left. In the 1970s I actually had someone tell me that in spite of her misogyny Phyllis Schlafly was her sister because of birth and in spite of my being a hard working feminist because of my birth I could never be. That for the same reasons the homophobic Anita Bryant was her sister but no matter how hard I worked at The Lesbian Tide, I was not.

It has always escaped me how people who demand autonomy for themselves when it comes to intimate matters on issues like abortion access and birth control can not see the contradiction in denying TS/TG folks the same self determination and autonomy regarding decisions they might make regarding their own bodies.
Perhaps it is time for those resurrecting the anti-transsexual/anti-transgender rhetoric to engage in what we in Weather called criticism/self-criticism because their bigoted politics suck and are in contradiction with both feminism and gay/lesbian liberation.

Perhaps the people exercising this anti-TS/TG bigotry would be happier among the right wing racist and homophobic hate groups that share the same sorts of bigoted language that show class hatred towards entire classes of people based on fictitious stereotype, even when some in that group may actually exhibit that stereotype.

No gods, No masters

The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.

–Soren Kierkegaard

Existentialism is interested in people’s quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom.

Man exists in a state of distance from the world that he nonetheless remains in the midst of. This distance is what enables man to project meaning into the disinterested world of in-itselfs. This projected meaning remains fragile, constantly facing breakdown. In such a breakdown, we are put face to face with the naked meaninglessness of the world, and the results can be devastating.

To existentialism and absurdism!

PS: In better circles, this shit is called ‘Your Candy.’ Go figure.

Don’t believe enough to be an orthodox, true-blue Mormon…

…but you still have some compelling reason to stay…you don’t want to abandon your Mormonism…

Is there such a thing as a Middle Way?

Many people think so. Madam Curie wrote a great blog post assessing if Middle Way Mormonism is actually possible for the Mormon church. Since I’m very interested in this kind of topic, I wrote an excessively lengthy comment back…but I wanted to address the issue here too. I wanted to address the subject from a perspective of personal integrity or authenticity.

I think of authenticity as an awareness — and an effort to seek — whatever one truly is. Authenticity is highly subjective, of course. It depends on one’s attitudes, feelings, emotions, and a load of other things that are highly personal. But the mission is to try to scrape away all the junk…all the noise…all of the inauthenticities we bring upon ourselves (or which is brought upon us) by the roles we play with others.

Being authentic doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve discovered objective reality or truth. We would like to think this, but…history hasn’t been on our side. However, the good thing is that authenticity doesn’t necessarily really care about the final reality…or maybe the final reality doesn’t care about authenticity.

How do we know when we are being authentic or not? Authenticity, I think, brings harmony, peace, joy, and these other “good” things. It is knowing you’re on the right track. It’s not just about happiness…because you can be sad or under stress and still have be on the right track. Rather, it’s about something deeper…something more subtle, but more fulfilling.

At the same time, inauthenticity is the opposite of these things. It’s not simple sadness, but it is something that reaches to our core…it is as if we are killing ourselves. We are annihilating ourselves. We are forsaking ourselves. Because we are denying and lying about ourselves and we are the only ones who can even possibly tell our story, if we won’t or don’t tell it, it dies.

Being Mormon (or anything else…being a teacher…being a son…being a husband…) involves playing certain roles with respect to others in the environment. It creates expectations on the relationship with family, friends, priesthood leadership, and even God.

It would be ideal if these expectations resonated with the way we viewed ourselves and the way we felt. Whenever this is the case, we can say that being Mormon (or a teacher…or whatever) does not break our authenticity. I believe that for many true blue Mormons, Mormonism is authentic for them. It is what they truly are (whether permanently or at that stage of time.) So, they find joy from Mormonism. And some interpret this as the truthfulness of the church.

However, this isn’t the case for all members…for some…something within or about the church drills deeply and painfully. It doesn’t feel right to us, and continuing to pretend that it does feel like we are killing ourselves.

When this is the case, what do we do?

While there are many solutions, one such solution is Middle Way Mormonism…and this is where the controversy comes in. Because while the doubting member acknowledges that something about the church drills into their very livelihood…they also recognize that to eliminate Mormonism itself from their lives would drill into them another way. So…why can’t they reach a happy medium? Why can’t they have family, community, the beliefs that resonate with them…without the guilt, frustration, troublesome beliefs? Why can’t they be a Middle Way Mormon?

I think the concept is great…but I have reservations. I don’t understand it…I don’t get the appeal.

Because for one…Mormonism has an institution. Its institution sets guidelines, rules, and expectations. When one decides to disassociate from these expectations and create their own, one risks the chance of incurring the wrath of the institution. Why should someone do this?

So, let’s take a temple recommend interview, for example. A good, faithful Mormon has a role expectation to be a faithful, worthy, temple recommend holder. How does the middle-way Mormon get around these expectations while maintaining appearances of being a good, faithful Mormon? John Dehlin has an article (which I’ve gone over in detail) called “How to stay in the LDS Church after a Major Challenge to Your Faith” that suggests some solutions. Control+F for his section “temple recommend.”

There you will see some ways he suggests to reassess the worthiness interview and its questions.

And here comes some of my biggest issues with the middle way. These reassessments, these new answers and new ways of looking at the questions…strike me deeply as inauthentic. The assumptions that John lists at the beginning of the section don’t seem ad hoc to me…rather, they seem to be reasonable assumptions made based on years of living within the church about what people would believe are operational definitions of terms. So, I couldn’t simply disregard them without feeling in the back of my mind that I’m changing the rules on my bishop or stake president. If I did, I feel I would be purposefully answering questions in a way that I believe they would interpret my “yes” answers in a different way than I do. And this strikes me as a self-annihilating act.

So, middle way Mormonism loses its allure for me. It makes more sense to admit that I am not a faithful Mormon. From there, I believe that ex-Mormonism, which doesn’t have an “institution” with tight expectations, allows me to freely and authentically define my ex-Mormonism.

But…I have to recognize that others’ mileages may vary…I must imagine that when John answers these questions, he does not feel deceptive or coy in the slightest. He must not feel any internal conflict, much less a metaphysical annihilation of personal integrity. So for him and many others, the middle way path may yet be authentic. Who am I to take that away from them?

Agarthans, Humanity’s Mentors

I have had Sheldan Nidle as a guest on Talk For Food on several occasions. The first time was in April 2008, as one of the stops on my first seven-day “road trip” to Northern California.

At the time hadn’t realized that I had actually read one of his early books, You Are Becoming a Galactic Human. He’s written and produced other books and videos since, and publishes regular updates to email subscribers (www.paoweb.com). I found the subject matter so compelling at the time, and his command of the information so sincere, that after finishing our interview, I asked if he had the energy to do another!

Fortunately, he did. It was quite a gesture that he and his partner, Colleen Marshall, welcomed me into their home on the strength of a couple phone calls, but that’s what happened. And as we witness the passage of time, ending 2009 and the beginning of 2010, many of the concepts that Sheldan speaks so passionately on, are becoming headlines.

This video is part of just one hour of a workship that panned 1.5 days held in Montgomery, Alabama, titled, “Making Galactic Sense Out of Chaos.”

I have produced five or six Talk For Food programs from this workshop, but due to the production effort involved, this is the first video that I’ve released thus far.

However, the visual experience provides its own information that sometimes doesn’t come through via audio alone.

I hope you find it useful.

LISTEN

To listen to the entire Talk For Food podcast of this segment, click here.

The New York Times reports: (Albert) “Camus’s son, Jean, says interring his father’s remains at the Panthéon, the Paris monument to some of the great men and women of France [as proposed by President Sarkozy], would be contrary to his father’s wishes and does not want to have his legacy put to work in the service of the state…”

Camus, author of The Rebel, The Plague, The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus, is “currently buried in the cemetery of Lourmarin, in the Luberon area of Provence. He died in a car crash in the town of Villeblevin, in Burgundy, on Jan. 4, 1960, at the age of 46.”

I think he’d have  had a good laugh about this. One more stone to shove up the hill.

Harvested Wheat Fields ©Weatherstone/Ron Almberg, Jr. (2009)

What I see
blindly pleas
what I smell
does compel
me to believe
that all
of consequence
is physical.

What I hear
does endear
what I touch
pulls much
my heart toward
all that
my senses tell
is material.

What I taste
gives feast
what I feel
makes real
to my soul
that all
I consume
only matters.

What blindness!
What deafness!
What blandness!
What madness!

I failed to perceive
the deepest part of me that
reaches beyond
body, soul, and mind
touches eternity and divinity.
It is my awakened spirit.

©Weatherstone/Ron Almberg, Jr. (2009)

Like you, I spend a lot of time sitting around in my pants, staring into the terrifying blankness of my own existence and contemplating the pointlessness of everything. To ameliorate the hollowness and despair, I like to self-medicate through existential crises with a potent combination of Doritos, temazepam and a carefully choreographed programme of intense masturbation. Weird thing is, since turning 30, I’m shitting breezeblocks as I increasingly Guantanamo myself with thoughts of my own mortality. It’s like the Woody Allen joke about terrible food: life relentlessly sucks a big donkey’s dick, but you still want more of it.

So I’ve set about trying to prolongue my exposure to all the gaping emptiness that inevitably awaits. I’ve started to exercise. I’ve started to run. It’s my girlfriend’s idea (self-pitying onanism isn’t ‘proper’ exercise, apparently). In many ways, it’s a good idea. I’ll get to enjoy the forthcoming apocalypse from my own portable throne, because my knees will be completely bojangled.

Anyway, I’m quite getting into it. We’re planning a 10k run in the New Year, together, like the sickeningly in-love middle-class Guildford couple we are. I’ve even got a watch that tracks my route with GPS and then gets cross at me for being slower than I was yesterday, encouraging a fierce and unhealthy rivalry with my younger, fitter self. I can currently run 5k in 22 minutes. Whoopee for me.

I was thinking about blogging about running and how I’m progressing but I’m not really sure what there is to say. Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running sounds interesting, but I’m put off by the possibility of wading through another 400 pages of whimsical surrealism where running is probably an extended metaphor for the trials and tribulations faced by overweight talking barnacles. So I’m not going to read that. Instead, I’ll just nick the idea from the title.  Here’s a list of some of the things that go through my brain when I’m moving at speeds that make me indiscernible to the human eye…

 1) Crikey, these pants are tight. Is everything tucked in? Feels a bit breezy down there.

2) Was he looking at my groin?

3) Is it me or is this hill steeper than yesterday?

4) Lace is undone. Fuck.

5) Legs ache.

6) Better check watch.

7) 1 min 30. Approximately 25 left to go. Fuck.

8) Legs really ache. Can’t…breathe.

9) I could just walk home now. Nobody would ever know.

10) Jade Goody did a marathon without practising. Maybe training for a 10k is overkill? The atmosphere of the occasion will get me through.

11) Jade Goody is dead.

12) Jade Goody didn’t die of running.

13) I’m not sure what the moral of Jade Goody is in this context.

14) Need a wee.

15) Legs hurt.

16) Watch check. 10 minutes 40. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

17) Fuck the fuck out of my fucking way, dildo dog.

18) “No. No really. No worries. Yes, he’s a lovely dog isn’t he? Ahhhhh. He’s a lovely dog. You’re lovely dog aren’t you? Lovely dog.”

19) Legs hurt. Arms hurt. Feet hurt. Back hurts. Neck hurts. Can’t breathe. Snot. Pouring. Down. Face. Sweaty. Smell. Like. Raccoon’s. Vagina.

20) Hot girl! Hot girl!

21) Did she notice me?

22) Yes.

23) Shit.

24) 5 minutes to go. Step it up.

25) Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

26) Think the pain away. Think the pain away. Think the pain away.

27) Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

28) Did I leave the gas on?

29) What’s the name of that thing where you press your balls against a window to make them look like vacuum-packed chicken?

30) Pancaking?

31) No, that’s something else isn’t it?

32) Was I being offensive at that party last night?

33) Yes.

34) I shouldn’t be allowed to speak.

35) Uh, was that some shit?

36) Yes.

37) Is this over yet?

38) Nearly.

39) Oh, you’ve already stopped.

40) LOSER!

By Amateur Philosopher Penny Ham

If any of you are familiar with the continental and analytic divide in philosophy, then you probably know by now that analytic philosophy is the shit. No wonder so many continental philosophers are so opposed to analytic philosophy – they naturally hate what they do not understand. Continental philosophers and existentialists like to ramble on about empirically unverifiable terms all day. For instance, I was thinking just a little while ago about purpose and other such existential/continental philosophy themes. But then I realized that the proposition “I have created my own purpose” is meaningless since there are no possible state of affairs where such a statement can be empirically falsified or empirically verified. So obviously to ask “do I have purpose?” is seeking meaningless answers. But maybe if you think of purpose as a kind emergent state of physical processes, then maybe we’re getting somewhere. As long as we can give a good physicalist description of each existential term that we use, progress can be made.

In the mean time, however, why should we be concerned by such meaningless things as existentialism when discussing the notion of free will or determinism? The answer is that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with existentialism since it’s a waste of time. We needn’t look any further than W.V.O Quine’s statement: “all philosophy is philosophy of science.” Does purpose, despair, human futility have anything to do with that? No. Therefore, such discussions of existential terms, unless they’re explained and defined in terms of a physicalist description, can only be called “literature” and not philosophy. Poor literature if you ask me.

Existentialists and continental philosophers would really solve a lot of their own problems if they just used symbolic logic. I think one thing that makes me happier more than anything is to think of a world in which everything can be explained symbolic logically. Like I could just go through a modus ponens-like proof and deduce everything I so desire. That would be awesome. Also, in this world, every city is built with a Cartesian coordinate plane set up. In this world, when you ask set-theoretically, where to find the mall, a person could tell you the (x,y) coordinates in set-theoretical terms. Also streets wouldn’t have names, they would just have a function description like “f(x) = 5.” Do you know how cool that would be?

What’s more, in this ideal analytic philosophy world the President’s inaugural address should contain some symbolic demonstrative proof of something. Cars would run on books written by continental/existential philosophers (this would solve the oil depletion problem). The existential/continental philosophy books would be used not because the books were prohibited from being read by people in that society but because people in that society couldn’t find any other use for them. They deserve some use, right? In fact, continental philosophers would benefit greatly from having their books used as fuel. That way they’re all happy and despairing.

In Spanish, the word for “fun” is “divertido.” Is all fun diversion from one’s recognition of their existence? There is something markedly different between a person who takes pleasure in something for its immediate sense of entertainment compared to a person who takes pleasure in something for its eternal benefit; the person who spends all their time seeking thrill in sex versus the person who spends their time in prayer and meditation.

The person who lives for a moment (i.e. orgasm of sex) will see what they live for pass; the person who lives to maintain holiness will see what they live for extend into eternity. Not that the holy person shirks fun, but the person who’s highest hope is in the hedonistic pleasures of the bodily senses will see their hopes lost as they are fulfilled, for as soon as they gain what they have hoped for they must work to gain it again; beyond that, we know the pleasure is fleeting. A person is rich enough not because they hope for money, but because what they hope for isn’t found in what money can buy. In this way the fun of the person who seeks holiness can place these pleasures in the context of a life that acknowledges pleasure isn’t all. Success for them is not in a job promotion but in the peace that is found through the certainty only found in the immutability of God.

The Saint is ultimately unswayable and always finds life worth living, for it is not the things in this life that are worth living for, but for those things beyond their own lives that make life worth living. The heathen whose toys have been taken away has no more purpose, and our toys being taken away is the ultimate fate of all whether they live for ever or not. We know that all pleasures lose their grasp over us to make us “lose ourselves in them.” Hell may be nothing more than this life extended forever without the solace of God, of which I cannot imagine anything worse.

The Philosopher’s question “What is life worth living?” is answered sufficiently only by Christianity, because it doesn’t offer one’s self to themselves (hedonism, Satanism), it doesn’t offer one’s self to the abyss (Buddhism), it doesn’t offer one’s self to the culture (Hinduism, relativism), it doesn’t one’s self to their own constructs (pragmatism, nihilism), it doesn’t offer one’s self to delusions (liberalism, communism), it doesn’t offer one’s self to what is ultimately doomed (humanism); it offers one’s self to the Absolute, the Immutable, the Omnimax, the Logos. Christ illuminates not only the meaning of life, but the entirety of life itself and the person; we are who we are in relation to God, and if there were no objective to be in relation to, then we are nobody.

Without the Absolute to offer ourselves to and subsequently gain our being through, we are ultimately nobody; those who lack the Absolute seek to forget their lack of identity by feeding the passions which are all they know themselves to be.

Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Here is a short piece from a post I did at The Excerpt Mill on  Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) in where I quote Barbara S. Andrew:

One of the most significant aspects of The Second Sex is its encyclopedic indexing of women’s lived experience: biology, psychology, the experience of living in a female body and developing and living with a feminine mind-set. Many contemporary women’s first reaction to reading it is that they do not experience themselves in the way Beauvior describes. But this is to miss the point. Most of The Second Sex is a phenomenological, descriptive analysis. Beauvoir is not claiming that there is one way that we who are women experience ourselves, our bodies or our minds. Instead, she describes, and argues against taking as perspective, literary representations of femininity, biological sciences’ accounts of femininity, psychoanalytic theories about femininity, and so on. It is easy, initially, to confuse her work as participating in negative stereotypes of femininity, rather than cataloging them and analyzing their effect. Although Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s bodies may seem negative, Arp argues that she is describing women’s experience of bodily alienation in understanding their social bodies, that is, the body as known through the experience of a sexist world.

Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Barbara S. Andrew writes about Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and her phenomenology and views of what it is to be a woman in a male-supremacist society:

For phenomenologists, “the world” usually denotes a combination of the natural world and human relationships.  A key aspect of phenomenology is the interaction between self and world, and The Second Sex may be best understood as a work of phenomenlogy in which Beauvior examines the interaction between the gendered self and the gendered world.  The Second Sex looks at how social ideas of femininity shape women’s experiences of self.  One of the most significant aspects of The Second Sex is its encyclopedic indexing of women’s lived experience: biology, psychology, the experience of living in a female body and developing and living with a feminine mind-set.  Many contemporary women’s first reaction to reading it is that they do not experience themselves in the way Beauvior describes.  But this is to miss the point.  Most of The Second Sex is a phenomenological, descriptive analysis.  Beauvoir is not claiming that there is one way that we who are women experience ourselves, our bodies or our minds.  Instead, she describes, and argues against taking as perspective, literary representations of femininity, biological sciences’ accounts of femininity, psychoanalytic theories about femininity, and so on.  It is easy, initially, to confuse her work as participating in negative stereotypes of femininity, rather than cataloging them and analyzing their effect.  Although Beauvoir’s descriptions of women’s bodies may seem negative, Arp argues that she is describing women’s experience of bodily alienation in understanding their social bodies, that is, the body as known through the experience of a sexist world. (Andrew, 30)

Source

Barbara S. Andrew.  ”Beauvior’s place in philosophical thought.”  In The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir edited by Claudia Card, 24-44.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Christians are hearing about the Manhattan Declaration with great excitement.  It is a tremendous document with tremendous support from some tremendous Christian figures.

The actual declaration (linked to above) is some 4,000 plus words long, and is available to read at the link above.  But here is the nutshell version:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I hope you stand with me – and with (at last count as of November 24, 2009) 106,738 other believers – and sign this declaration.

It reminds me of another time, and another declaration: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was a point-by-point denunciation of the fascist and racist ideological doctrines of Nazism and a positive expression of true Christian faith against a government and a culture that had become evil.

Adolf Hitler attempted to redefine – or “Nazify” – the Church and transform it into a component of his ideological agenda.  At one point in its history Germany had been the seat of the Protestant Reformation, and while Germany had since become the most secular humanist nation in Europe, there was still a vestige of Christianity remaining.  And Hitler wanted to harness that still-influential vestige toward his own ends.  The government thus passed resolutions to limit the influence or dictate the agenda of the church.  One demanded the purging of all pastors who rejected “the spirit of National Socialism.”  Another resolution categorically rejected the very foundations of Judeo-Christian transcendent morality even as it tried to conflate “being a German” with “being a Christian”:

“We expect that our nation’s church as a German People’s Church should free itself from all things not German in its services and confession, especially from the Old Testament with its Jewish system of quid pro quo morality.”

The German Confessing Movement was a reaction against the German government’s attempt to impose its agenda upon the Christian Church in Germany.  As Gene Edward Veith put it in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview:

The Barmen Declaration thus sets itself against not only the German Christian aberration but against the whole tradition of modernist syncretism that made it possible.

[Article 1 affirmed Christ as the transcendent authority and source of values (as opposed to the German race, the Nazi revolution, or the person of Adolf Hitler)].  Article 2 asserts the sovereignty of Christ over all of life.  Article 3 asserts Christ’s lordship over the church and rejects “the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political conventions.”  That is to say, the world does not set the agenda for the church.  Article 4 teaches that church offices are for mutual service and ministry, not for the exercise of raw power.  Article 5 acknowledges the divine appointment of the state, but rejects the pretensions of the state to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.”  Article 6 affirms the church’s commission to proclaim the free grace of God to everyone by means of the Word and the sacraments.  “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans [pp. 60-61].

One article, entitled “Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide,” takes time to describe how various key German liberal theologians systematically tore apart the Bible and orthodox Christianity – and in so doing systematically undermined the ethics and morality of the German people in preparation for the hell to come.  The author begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, called “the founder of Liberal Protestantism,” and profiles the “contributions” of Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Wellhausen, and Adolf von Harnack.

Georg Lukacs has observed that tracing the path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Weber [page 5, The Destruction of Reason].  And Max Weinreich produced an exhaustive study detailing the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime entitled Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.  Ideas have consequences, and it was the ideas of these liberal theologians, philosophers and scholars who provided the intellectual justification and conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Thus Nazism did not merely emerge from a liberal theological system, but from a distinguished secular humanist intellectual tradition as well — a distinguished intellectual tradition that had repudiated all the moral and spiritual values inherent to the orthodox Christianity of the Confessing Church.

Josef Hromadka wrote that:

“The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed.  It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of “the law of nature”; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the “Jewish” law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation, respectively.  It had made all the necessary preparation for the “Germanization of Christianity” and for a racial Church.”

Veith subsequently says, “in deciding whether or not to sign the Barmen Declaration … the dividing line was clear.”  And he states, “The German Christian theologians predictably denounced the confessional movement as being ‘narrow’ and ‘fundamentalist.’”  He rightly described the opponents of the Barmen Declaration as being “modernists,” “existentialists,” and “dialectical” in their thinking.  The theologians who rejected Barmen were men like Emanuel Hirsch, who taught that the resurrection of Christ was only a spiritual vision, and that the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter rather than to the culture and community of the present.

In short, it was Christians who thought like the evangelicals and fundamentalists of today who signed the Barmen Declaration and openly opposed Nazism, and it was “Christians” who thought like the mainline liberals of today who stood for the German Christian Nazification of Christianity and for the resulting Nazification of German ethics and morality.

Confessing Church pastors and priests who resisted this Nazification of the church paid dearly.  Thousands of clergymen were hauled away to the concentration camps.  According to the Niemoller archives, 2,579 clergymen were sent to Dachau alone – and 1,034 of them died in the camp.  And that only refers to the priests and pastors – not the untold thousands of devout Christians such as the Ten Booms who perished in the death camps for their opposition to Nazism.

An article entitled “Asking ‘Why Nazism?’” reviewing a book by Dr. Karla Poewe has this:

“One of the dangers of liberal Christianity, where all sorts of interpretations are permitted, is that it can easily slip into becoming a new religion,” Poewe says. “This is what happened. In a bid to rid Germany of what it saw as Jewish Christianity, several home-grown practices sprang up, including some that incorporated Icelandic and pre-Christian sagas, as well as ideas from German Idealism.”

Although initially these new religions were separate and disorganized entities, they eventually came under the umbrella of what was known as the German Faith Movement. Hitler saw in it a mechanism for transmitting and reinforcing the National Socialist worldview. “He shaped its followers into a disciplined political force but dismissed its leaders later when they were no longer needed,” Poewe says.

We’re clearly not to the point where Jews, or Christians, or anyone else are being gathered by the thousands and placed in death camps.  But we’re beginning to see a trend that is frightening, as government, with the assistance of liberal “Christian” churches and organizations, are trying to impose their will upon the church and its agenda.

We’ve had a “hate crimes” law imposed upon us that makes homosexuality a protected behavior.  And one evangelical expresses the Confessing Church position in a nutshell:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a written statement the bill “is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

In another recent case, a Christian mother who has homeschooled her child is being forced to put her ten-year old child in public school, not to improve her academic education, but to limit her exposure to Christianity and forcibly expose her to a government-approved “public” point of view:

According to the court order, the guardian concluded that Amanda’s “interests, and particularly her intellectual and emotional development, would be best served by exposure to a public school setting in which she would be challenged to solve problems presented by a group learning situation and…Amanda would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior.”

This is a shocking case, in which the government is usurping both parental and religious freedoms.  And there are many similar usurpations today, in which our government is actively opposing Christian values.

Nearly fifty million babies have been killed in this country by a government-sanctioned “pro-choice” system.  Gene Edward Veith addresses the “pro-choice” movement and its philosophical underpinnings:

Existential ethics brackets the objective issues on abortion entirely.  At issue is not some transcendent moral law, nor medical evidence, nor a logical analysis.  The content of that choice makes no difference.  If the mother chooses to have the baby, her action is moral.  If she chooses not to have the baby, her action is still moral.  If she bears a child against her will or aborts a child against her will — then and only then is the action evil.  Those who believe that abortion should be legal do not consider themselves “pro-abortion.”  They are “pro-choice.”  The term is not only a rhetorical euphemism but a precise definition of existential ethics.

Existentialism is also reflected in those who are “pro-choice” but personally oppose abortion.  They do not believe in abortion for themselves, but refuse to impose their beliefs on others.  In this view, a belief has no validity outside the private, personal realm of each individual.  Moral and religious beliefs are no more than personal constructions, important in giving meaning to an individual’s life, but not universally valid.  Or, to use another commonly accepted axiom, “what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Such a view of truth flies in the face of all classical metaphysics, which sees truth as objective, universal, and applicable to all” (page 96, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview).

We can return to the historical analysis of Nazism presented by Karla Poewe, and what happened when such “anything goes” belief systems were allowed to rule.  [I am writing an article describing how existentialism became a primary component of Nazism, and will link to it here when I am finished writing it].

Before we leave the issue of abortion as a vile violation of Christian ethics and morality, let us consider one more voice:

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” — Mother Teresa

Christians should fight for life.  And allowing a human being to live should not be a “choice,” but a duty.

In 2003 one David Allen Black wrote an article bearing the question, “Do We Need A New Barmen Declaration?“  No Christian with a knowledge of history can answer any other way than, “YES!“

The Barmen Declaration was written in 1934, but in many ways it was already too late: The Nazis were already in power.  Hitler was in his second year of power; and the ideas of the liberal theologians, the existentialist philosophers, and the amoral intellectuals were already firmly in place.

It is my fervent hope that we finally have that “New Barmen Declaration” to answer the evils of our own day.  If we already should have written one, then every day that passes is one more day wasted; if we are acting pro-actively, then let us thank God that we acting before it is too late.

From the UK Telegraph:

At last, Christians draw a line in the sand against their PC secularist persecutors

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 24th, 2009

At long last, Christian leaders have faced up to their persecutors in the secularist, socialist, One-World, PC, UN-promoted axis of evil and said: No more. In the popular metaphor, they have drawn a line in the sand. For harassed, demoralised faithful in the pews it will come as the long-awaited call to resistance and an earnest that their leaders are no longer willing to lie down supinely to be run over by the anti-Christian juggernaut. This statement of principle and intent is called The Manhattan Declaration, published last Friday in Washington DC.

It is difficult to believe that so firm an assertion of Christian intransigence in the face of persecution will not have some beneficial effects even here. For this Declaration is no minor affirmation by a few committed activists: on the contrary, it is signed by the most important leaders of three mainstream Christian traditions – the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Evangelical Protestants. For an ecumenical document it is heroically devoid of fudge, euphemism and compromise.

The Manhattan Declaration states that “the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions”.

For Barack Obama, the PC lobby, the “hate crime” fascists and, by implication, their opposite numbers in Britain, the signatories have an uncompromising message: “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” That is plain speaking, in the face of anti-Christian aggression by governments. The signatories spelled it out even more unequivocally: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

In a world where a Swedish pastor has been jailed for preaching that sodomy is sinful, similar prosecutions have taken place in Canada, the European Court of Human Rights (sic) has tried to ban crucifixes in Italian classrooms, Brazil has passed totalitarian legislation imposing heavy prison sentences for criticism of homosexual lifestyles, Amnesty International is championing abortion, David Cameron has voted for the enforced closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and Gordon Brown’s government has just been defeated in its fourth attempt to abolish the Waddington Clause guaranteeing free speech – this robust defiance is more than timely.

The signatories are unambiguously expressing their willingness to go to prison rather than deny any part of their religious beliefs. Those signatories are heavyweight. On the Catholic side they include Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Adam Cardinal Maida, Archbishop Emeritus of Detroit; the Archbishops of Denver, New York, Washington DC, Newark, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Louisville; and other Bishops. The Orthodox include the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and the Archpriest of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. There are also the Anglican Primates of America and Nigeria, as well as a host of senior Evangelical Protestants.

In terms of influence on votes and public opinion, this is a formidable coalition. It has served notice on the US government that further anti-Christian legislation will provoke cultural trench warfare and even civil disobedience. As regards the sudden stiffening of resistance among the usually spineless Catholic leadership, it is impossible not to detect the influence of Benedict XVI.

We need more declarations like this, on a global scale, and the requisite confrontational follow-up. This is Clint Eastwood, make-my-day Christianity – and not before time. From now on, any governments that are planning further persecution of Christians had better make sure they have a large pride of lions available for mastication duties. The worm has turned.

As a young Christian, I was inspired by the music, lyrics, and album cover of Keith Green’s album, No Compromise.  The cover says it all:

The Manhattan Declaration – like the Barmen Declaration – calls for Christians who are willing to stand up and be singled out even in the face of persecution or punishment.

I hope you are willing to be one of those Christians.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Sara (Bibi Andersson) shows Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) his reflection.

It is certainly fair to say that much of Ingmar Bergman’s work (The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander) takes an experienced mind to fully appreciate. As elitist as I’m in danger of sounding for writing that, I do believe it, but I will also concede that I am by no means experienced enough in life to appreciate Wild Strawberries fully. It makes me wonder why a film like Wild Strawberries would be shown in film classes to budding and perhaps talented artists, but not unlike me, they are most likely novices at life. Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) is not a novice. He knows what it is like to lose love and surrender to something less. He knows exactly what it is like to be lulled and deceived by life’s trials. For so long he was dead in life and would become alive again during the process of his death. It is a bittersweet and profoundly beautiful realization that Dr. Borg is compelled to find in this truly amazing film.

From left; Ingmar Bergman with cast members Jullan Kindahl, who plays Adga, and Sjöström.

Wild Strawberries follows the one day journey of 76 year old medical scientist Isak Borg. Isak was born into a family of ten children and he is the only one alive today. He has been a doctor for fifty years, a father for probably more than thirty years, a widower for some time, and socially he has withdrawn quite a bit. He is being rewarded for his professional accomplishments and he travels to his destination to receive his honors. Through interactions with various characters, through triggered memories, and sometimes through horrific dream sequences, this film turns out to be a meditation on Dr. Borg’s life. It is ultimately about a man in the twilight of his life gazing into the mirror, perhaps for the final time, to find some level of resolution and comfort.

Surreal scene from one of the film's dream sequences.

There are so few filmmakers today making existential road films like this. Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Children of Men) comes to mind. It’s so rare to find something so deep and succinct. Most films that rely to any degree of making philosophical statements through dream sequences and similar devices are often reduced to being vague, cryptic, and sometimes even pretentious. Wild Strawberries provides both a glimpse into the psychology of Dr. Borg as well as a more macrocosmic spirituality some viewers will empathize with and find endlessly rewarding. It is a film about nerves and dread but at the same time it is a film about authentic self-identity, satisfaction, and peace. There’s a lot to learn here. This is a film to enjoy multiple times for sure.

My rating is 5 out of 5 stars.

“What our age lacks, however, is not reflection, but passion.”

Life should be lived with passion.  Passion is a devotion, a decision to tie your finite life to something.  Rather than hedging bets, this devotion must take place in the awareness of the opportunity cost it presents – to devote yourself to one thing implies the inability to devote yourself to another.  To try to pretend otherwise encounters two deficiencies: a lack of fatality and a lack of depth.  Lacking fatality in your passion results in your discovering you were never really passionate at all.  To lack fatality means that that which has captured your attention remains a game, something playful where even the worst of outcomes can be tolerated.  Because the stakes are small, the results are also of little overall effect.  Watch a man who makes a twenty dollar bet with a friend on a sporting event.  Now imagine a man who has wagered his home, savings and the lives of his loved ones on the same game.  With everything at stake, nothing in the world is more important.

To have passion means to have devotion, the way one is devoted to one’s own child.  We regularly use expressions like “to live and die with” when referring to our interest in any number of diversions.  He lives and dies with that team.  She lives and dies with that show.  We equate that feeling with passion, but when compared with the idea of living and dying with the well-being of one’s family, the previous use of the same expression loses a degree of its sense of importance.  Hence, such passion lacks fatality – one’s life is not set in a determined direction upon the winds of fortune which blow from such pursuits.  Without the awareness of the cost being paid, which is one’s own finite life, as a wager in the devotion, there will always persist in one’s mind an assurance that all mistakes can be corrected, all offenses redressed simply by starting everything all over again, taking another chance to build up from scratch.  Any failure can be met with optimism that it will not be made again, and as a result failures are only considered by means of measuring the time given to their perpetuation.  Time, when the immediacy of fatality is not present, is infinite – and so any measurable portion of infinity can, in the end, be considered infinitely trivial.

Fatality’s partner is depth.  People object to the idea of devoting themselves single-mindedly to a purpose, saying that it is arbitrary to require them to give all of their attention to only one cause in life.  This is not what I mean by devoting oneself single-mindedly.  However, let’s assume that a man does disperse his passion through a handful of activities he enjoys or in which he finds meaning.  The result is a man who is quite wide in learning, his knowledge covering an impressive range of fields and disciplines.  He is capable of holding a conversation on almost any topic and where his knowledge is lacking he is able to wrangle the flow of the discussion towards an area in which he is more fluent.  His wit can cover for the lack of time we all suffer from in studying up on an inexhaustible stream of information that circulates through the popular media, trickling down to dinner table debates and friendly back-and-forths with strangers and acquaintances alike at apartment parties.  If he’s at a total loss, he can even muster up the resolve to ask you to tell him what your opinions are, since he is admittedly ignorant regarding the topic at hand, though in the back of his mind he knows if he really cared about whatever it is that is up for discussion, he’d have already formed an opinion on it, if he hasn’t already despite his ignorance - a certain go-to, gut instinct that never fails him – all of this taking place in a context where we know that no one really ever changes a dearly-held opinion anymore.  So we have a man thought of as intelligent and charismatic who lacks any kind of depth - while the moniker of “straw man” does not fit in this sense, our fathomless man could perhaps be called a paper man.  You can poke or prod the paper man to see what is behind him, but you can never get around his width.  He is always much too glib to be cornered, always too full of explanations, always too willing to befriend you.  But he has no true passion, for his frenetic nature is what leads him to run the length of the coast without ever plunging into the water, which is the most terrifying thing his mind can imagine.  No, choosing to enter the deep waters would leave him a dissolved mass of pulp, and the wider he has become, the thinner he is stretched, giving him less matter with which to reform himself if he has the misfortune of being dragged along unexpectedly to sea.  Even that crisis, though, would be manageable – the paper man has little riding on this unreflected accumulation of knowledge he regards as a self, and with a proper measure of amnesic fortitude he will be right back cutting himself out a flimsy new costume to wear.  He is seduced by beginnings, constantly going from port to port yet landlocked the entire time, never leaving his native continent.  He can give you plenty of quotations on love or beauty, and he could tell you what to do to live happily - you will probably even think he’s rather wise, but he will never live for himself, be happy himself.  What he fails to understand is that it is not the scope of metaphors one can call upon, but the depth of the metaphors that conveys a true sense of passion, a true sense of experience, not from simply being knowledgeable, but from having one’s eyes cracked and wrinkled in their corners from staring at the horizon under the sun, one’s forehead weathered from venturing into countless storms.  Depth of passion reflects a depth of character.  It reveals in a person the capacity to love.  Our paper man, he has many infatuations, but no true love.

Take any person who is sufficiently passionate about anything – baseball, for instance.  We can all picture the crusty old man, his better days long past, whose love of the game was so true and deep that he could understand baseball through his experiences in life and life through his experiences from baseball, both informing one another in harmony.  Ask him about music, and he might recall a tune or two he can still whistle, but press him to go further and he’ll unabashedly tell you he really didn’t have time for music in his more productive years.  He might have traveled extensively, and perhaps a few memories of places been or people come and gone will leave him feeling wistful for what has been lost, but in the end his love had been decided long ago, and it continues to inform him in his waning years.

We might consider such devotion as the old man has as quaint, if not outdated.  After all, in our times we have so many pressing matters to consider, and even if we have the luxury to think beyond our personal itineraries of endless tasks and errands we must see to every day, certainly we can imagine something more worthy of our passion than baseball – doesn’t its very nature of being a game betray an inherent lack of fatality?  How can a game compare to love, friends, family, the plight of the oppressed, wherever they may be?  Obviously there are many things in our lives worthy of our attention, our thorough attention – but only one can truly be an object of passion.  Give a wife the grim choice of deciding the fate of her husband, mother and two daughters – only one of them can live and it is up to this daughter/wife/mother to decide who that will be.  What a horrible fate - how can she possibly go about the decision?  Most people would immediately discount the idea of saving the husband, he’s too old, and a man to boot (as if men had less regard for their mortality than women), perhaps the mother as well – so without having to bring this macabre example to a conclusion, we can already agree that there is a hierarchy even amongst causes to which we would otherwise attribute supreme importance.  Now consider that in most of our lives all of these players will be at work – filial love, romantic love, love of our children, love of self, love of justice, love of aesthetic pleasure.  Consider also that we are without the impetus that our poor woman has in clearly setting her priorities for the world to know.  In the modern sense of being people searching for meaning in life, we are without such clear direction.  The point is not who the woman chooses, the point is that she must make a choice, just as we must make a choice in what our priorities are, and by the necessity of this choice it shows that what the object of our passion should be is not axiomatic, the answer contained in the definition of passion itself.  Though perhaps one could argue there are degrees of worthiness that characterize the possible objects of our passion, the point under consideration with which to begin is simply whether or not one has passion.  So leave our old man be, let him have his true love – if he found it important enough to love, who are we to begrudge him?

I visited the middle school a couple times, lately.  I feel that I had something there that I’m missing now.  Also, I took the SAT a few weeks ago.  I got a 1970 on it, which is worse than the 2090 I got the last time.  It doesn’t matter.  I got accepted to MSU, waiting for UMich.  I need to get my grades up, esp. in Stats.  I’d also like a date for winter formal.

I went on this trip to Key Largo for AP Bio.  It was awesome.  I got to see seagrass, mangroves, and reefs.  I almost got stung by a jellyfish a few times.  Matt lost his iPod.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

"You all say that. But I give no respite."

Crusader, Antonious Block (Max Von Sydow) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) have returned home after ten years. Unfortunately, thorough chaos and the black plague await them. Block himself comes face to face with a human manifestation of Death (Bengt Ekerot). Death has come for him and during Block’s trials over the last ten years he has felt his faith in God diminish. Block challenges Death to a game of chess that plays on throughout the entire film. We wonder if his expectations are to actually outwit Death and survive. During his many interactions with Death he asks for true knowledge of God’s existence and therefore some guidance as to his own. He is conflicted and to some degree he views the concept of God as merely an idol created to pacify fear and doom. These are just a few of the many insights that make their confrontation so enticing. Block’s squire Jöns seems to acknowledge and exist in this oblivion and acts as humanity’s voice of helplessness to Block. Block likely knows his death is forthcoming but is playing his game of chess as a way to delay the inevitable. The delay allows him to reunite with his wife and to further ponder on the existence of God. But most importantly, it is all a way for him to express and examine his utter dissatisfaction with the possibility that life has absolutely no meaning at all.

"I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me."

I was first exposed to some of Ingmar Bergman’s work when I was in my teens. Back then I only thought I understood Bergman. I was wrong; with Bergman there is always some new guidance to provide further appreciation for life. Unfortunately, this outstanding director passed away in July of 2007. I felt obligated to buy Criterion’s release of Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal. I’ve seen the Seventh Seal three times. The first time without really paying attention but just kind of suspecting it was something special, this was years ago in my late teens. The other two times I watched it alone and both times I became consumed by it; once as a pious Christian and once as a skeptical agnostic. I saw the film in a dramatically different light with each viewing but yet it was still a great experience. Needless to say, if you’ve seen The Seventh Seal and not felt that your faith or lack thereof is being questioned and tugged at then you may need to watch it again. In the end, I found a satisfying resolution either way and the film is both personal and universal in it’s commentary, so you may too. It is interesting to note that The Seventh Seal never tries to directly answer Block’s questions and almost anyone could walk away satisfied with the conclusion. The Seventh Seal isn’t necessarily about God and faith directly, but really just the aspects that produce them. The experience of life and finding comfort in our own personal existence is something only the ignorant or indifferent could look away from, and they may be the only ones unsatisfied with The Seventh Seal’s conclusion. As a character Block is anything but ignorant or indifferent. He is more alive and passionate throughout the film because he knows full well he is in Death’s grip and he wants to know if his actions in life are worth anything. This is a hugely significant film that tackles hugely significant subject matter and does so without preaching at us. It even uses some humor in doses at just the right time. I’m hopeful that one day a film like this could be produced again but somehow I see cinema going in a very different direction.

"Mia! I see them, Mia! I see them! Over there against the stormy sky. They are all there. The smith and Lisa, the knight, Raval, Jöns, and Skat. And the strict master Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict master with the scythe and hourglass. But the Fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears."

The DVD release itself is a very good one and I definitely recommend the Criterion release. The film has been restored enough to appreciate the cinematography for the time and budget, and there are also some great extras that really help to put Bergman’s film career in perspective. I can honestly say that no film affected me like The Seventh Seal and I am a Bergman fan for life, with still much of his filmmography left to discover and enjoy. He will be sorely missed.

My rating is 5 out of 5 stars.

This quote from Sartre captures my understanding of Existentialism.

“The existentialist . . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. . . . Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”

Originally posted on Great Cloud blog, which remains a helpful introductory blog to all things philosophy.

This might be a li’l out of sync with the class since we are way past phenomenology and into semiotics now.  Nevertheless,  I’m excited  that I got to see this video on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Ponty.  It seems to be an old talk show (70s or 80s )  with  Professor Hubert Dreyfus as the guest who explains the history of Phenomenology  from Husserl and Heidegger to Sartre and Ponty, how they differed and evolved, with huge emphasis on Husserl’s technical intentionality and Heidegger’s Dasein.  I wanted to share it with you all.

Note that the video has 5 parts. I see it as a more elaborate version of the paper we read for class [I think it is Dourish's Embodiment paper (?)] but it does not go deep into Embodiment.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

“The existentialist . . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. . . . Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”

Jean Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” 1946

Charles Bremner looks at the possibility of moving the late philosopher’s body to resting place of many prominent French figures:

Catherine Camus, one of his two surviving children, has mixed feelings. On one hand, she approved because “this would be a symbol for people for whom life is very hard.” But her father was a man who detested great honours, she noted. “That is why it is not a simple question.”

Jean, her twin brother and co-heir to her father’s very lucrative legacy,  told le Monde via intermediaries yesterday that he is opposed. Moving his remains from his grave in Lourmarin, near Avignon, would be be a “counter-sense” for a man who abhorred pomp and state honours. He also suspects that Sarkozy is trying to cash in on his father, according to le Monde.

I usually don’t like people who read Albert Camus, because they’re usually snobby. But one of my teachers recommended The Stranger, which has turned out to be worth my time/thoughts.

It’s one of several books I’ve been reading from my favorite circle of French existentialists lately and I’d say I recommend it, of only to familiarize yourself with their ideas. 

I have a copy that originally belonged to one of my good friend’s grandmother and it’s interesting to read her notes, while thinking about what my professor had to say about it and also listening to my own English majorness. 

I don’t like the hipster appearance, though, so I’ve found myself keeping the cover underwraps, while  I read it here at Linnaea’s.