The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

The peculiar dilemma of the self in our era has been noted by a wide range of writers, even as they have emphasized different aspects of that dilemma, such as the self’s alienation, disorientation, inflation, or fragmentation. In The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch bring together scholars from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, theology, literature, biology, and physics to address the inadequacies of modern and postmodern selves and, ultimately, to suggest what an alternative, “transmodern” account of the self might look like. The transmodern self, the editors argue, acknowledges meaning and purpose transcending the individual. In other words, it reflects an understanding of the human person that is not only intimately connected with the Judeo-Christian tradition but also rejects the twin delusions of absolute autonomy and cosmic meaninglessness that mark the present age.

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The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

The peculiar dilemma of the self in our era has been noted by a wide range of writers, even as they have emphasized different aspects of that dilemma, such as the self’s alienation, disorientation, inflation, or fragmentation. In The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch bring together scholars from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, theology, literature, biology, and physics to address the inadequacies of modern and postmodern selves and, ultimately, to suggest what an alternative, “transmodern” account of the self might look like. The transmodern self, the editors argue, acknowledges meaning and purpose transcending the individual. In other words, it reflects an understanding of the human person that is not only intimately connected with the Judeo-Christian tradition but also rejects the twin delusions of absolute autonomy and cosmic meaninglessness that mark the present age.

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The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

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Overview

The peculiar dilemma of the self in our era has been noted by a wide range of writers, even as they have emphasized different aspects of that dilemma, such as the self’s alienation, disorientation, inflation, or fragmentation. In The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch bring together scholars from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, theology, literature, biology, and physics to address the inadequacies of modern and postmodern selves and, ultimately, to suggest what an alternative, “transmodern” account of the self might look like. The transmodern self, the editors argue, acknowledges meaning and purpose transcending the individual. In other words, it reflects an understanding of the human person that is not only intimately connected with the Judeo-Christian tradition but also rejects the twin delusions of absolute autonomy and cosmic meaninglessness that mark the present age.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781932236866
Publisher: ISI Books
Publication date: 04/15/2006
Pages: 415
Product dimensions: 5.75(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Paul C. Vitz is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at New York University. His books include Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious; Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship and Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism.
 
Susan M. Felch is Professor of English at Calvin College. She is the editor of The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock and (with Paul J. Contino) Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith.

Read an Excerpt

The Self

Beyond the Postmodern Crisis

ISI Books

Copyright © 2006 ISI Books
All right reserved.

ISBN: 1-932236-86-4


Chapter One

The Imitative Self: The Contribution of Rene Girard

Gil Bailie

If there is a scripture passage that can be considered the bedrock of biblical anthropology, it must surely be Gen. 1:27, where we are told that God created human beings in his own image and likeness. What are we to make of this charming piece of folklore? Surely it is one of the biblical passages most suited to demythologization of the Bultmannian variety What serious biblical scholar, armed with the knowledge of the priestly authorship and sacerdotal biases of this text, would dare to regard it as anthropologically decisive? Even those who retain a deferential attitude toward Scripture, conceding its quaint anthropomorphism, might not think it strong enough to function as the fulcrum of biblical anthropology. How often does it happen, however, that the very texts we treat with smiling condescension turn out to be vastly more significant than those that accommodate themselves more readily to our existing prejudices and worldviews.

On the other hand, the historical nature of biblical revelation is such that the truth embedded in this ancient Scripture can be expected to release itself in response, not to idle curiosity or exegetical manipulation, but to the emergence of legitimate historical orexistential situations that throw us back upon it with humility. We who face these new situations call upon biblical resources for facing them, not with Bultmann's exegetically presumptuous but biblically timid approach, but rather with his appreciation for the "continual vitality which, thanks to the force of its original thrust, enables faith to dominate ever new historical situations by embracing them" (noted in Lubac 1986, 249).

The Mimetic Self

What can be said of a creature who is made in the image and likeness of another? Surely this: that this creature can only fulfill its destiny by becoming like someone else. So counterinstinctual and counterintuitive is such a thing, that the likelihood of this creature actually fulfilling such a destiny would be slim, indeed, unless the creature were somehow endowed with a desire to do so, a desire equally counterinstinctual and counterintuitive, a desire to be itself by becoming like someone else. If we really are made in the image and likeness of God, such a desire, dangerously fickle though it might be, could well function, after a kind of Dantean purification of itself, as the key to our sanctification.

But what a strange creature this would be, one endowed with a desire to fulfill its own unique destiny by modeling its life on another. Can any such creature be found? Rene Girard, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor in French Language, Literature, and Civilization, Emeritus at Stanford University, thinks he has found such a creature. In fact, he thinks he is one. Over the course of the last thirty years, Girard has insisted that the decisive feature of human existence is the central role played in human affairs by what he calls mimetic desire, the ineradicable impulse to desire what one sees another desiring, to fashion one's own desire on the model of another's desire, in short, to imitate. In books and articles too numerous to catalog, Girard has demonstrated the irreducible centrality of mimetic desire in human affairs, and in the course of demonstrating this he discovered something he never dreamed of discovering at the outset, namely, the anthropological centrality and historical singularity of the Christian revelation. Most of what I have to say is indebted to Girard.

So, let's begin with the hypothesis that Genesis is right, we are made in the image and likeness of God. But which god? For there are, as St. Paul tells us in First Corinthians, "many 'gods' and many 'lords'." (Biblical quotations are taken from the New American Bible.)

During summer 2001, the pop music idol Madonna launched a worldwide tour, which almost instantly sold out. The New York Times reported that on the day of the first New York performance the $125 scats were being scalped for $700. Susan Saulny (2001), the Times' reporter covering the opening night enthusiasm of Madonna's devotees, wrote:

There are, apparently, an infinite number of ways to show love for Madonna.

An unimaginative but nonetheless sincere fan might wear a T-shirt emblazoned with her likeness. A very good fan might slip into a kilt, in tribute to her fondness for things Scottish, or wear a rhinestone necklace and rubber bracelets, a la the original Material Girl. A great fan will dye black hair blond, squeeze a man's foot into a pair of high-heeled boots, and declare Madonna the icon of our age. But someone who has totally given himself over to Madonna, the pop artist of a thousand incarnations, will do all of these things at once. His name is Bobby Turtle. "This is the event of the century," Mr. Tuttle, who is 24, proclaimed last night to a crowd of believers eagerly waiting to enter Madison Square Garden, where Madonna was set to take the stage at 8 p.m. for the first of five sold-out performances.

The best commentary on the devotion of the most enthusiastic Madonna fans, and especially on those like Mr. Tuttle who have totally given themselves over to Madonna, is a sentence from Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: "There is not one element of this distorted mysticism," he writes, "which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth" (1965, 61). Which brings me to the central point of this essay, an ancient anticipation of the one just quoted from Girard. It comes from the second century theologian Tertullian. It is this: "The soul is naturally Christian."

Desire, Girard tells us, is always "the desire to be another." Whether one is squeezing a man's foot into a Madonnaesque pair of high-heeled boots or imitating the selflessness of Christ, our deepest and defining impulse is to adopt as our own the attributes of another. "Choice always involves choosing a model," Girard writes, "and true freedom lies in the basic choice between a human and a divine model" (1965, 58). To which I might add-revealing my own religious sensibilities-that since even our imitation of a divine model will inevitably involve the mediation of intermediary human models, Mr. Tuttle's ontological prognosis might be greatly improved if he were to fall under the spell of another Madonna. For nothing better encapsulates the spirit of Christian existence than the utterance placed into the mouth of Jesus' mother by the evangelist Luke: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to Thy word."

Nuptial Truth

To claim, however, that true freedom lies in choosing a proper model, is to raise this question: What is the nature of truth? Postmodernists are not terribly convincing when they say that they want to know the answer to this question, but that's because they continue to rely on modern skepticism without treating it, in a truly postmodern fashion, skeptically. The single greatest cultural contribution of postmodernity is that it eliminates the presumption of intellectual neutrality that modernity automatically associated with skeptical rationalism. By calling this presumption of neutrality into question, postmodernity makes a great breakthrough possible.

It shows, not that all truth is socially constructed, but that the uniquely human act of bearing witness to the truth is always a moral as well as an intellectual or empirical or noetic act.

As ludicrous and dangerous as the Nietzschean perspectival understanding of truth is-that there is no truth, only your truth and my truth and "Ted Turner's truth" and "Noam Chomsky's truth"-as ludicrous and dangerous as this idea is, might it not lead us to a rediscovery of the mystery of Christian truth, a mystery that has tended to be lost on those imbued exclusively with modernist epistemological preconceptions. I'm thinking, for instance, of the nuptial understanding of truth, that truth which will set one free, the kind of truth about which the Gospel is concerned and has a great deal to say and which awaits a yes on the part of its potential recipient. The etymological origin of the English word truth is the Old English word treowth, from which comes the word troth, suggesting a hidden covenantal understanding of truth. There may be reason to hope that in countering, as we must, the dangerous and cockeyed notions about truth circulating today under the postmodern banner we may discover a lost mystery.

The assumption that all truth is socially constructed is intimately linked to its postmodern corollary: the socially constructed (and deconstructed) self. These issues come together as well in quite different ways in Christian thought, and in responding to the postmodern challenge, Christians may well surprise themselves. For there seems to me a tremendous potential in the postmodern assumption that the self is an artificial social construct. The assumption is naive and it usually harbors hidden agendas, but if we took it seriously it might help awaken Christians to the fact that something at least as shocking lies at the heart of Christian personhood. In a very real sense, at the burning center of Christianity is a person who emphatically insists that he exists only to bear witness to another person, a person whose life is therefore iconic in the extreme, an icon of the invisible God, the God, moreover, in whose image and likeness Genesis tells us we are made. If postmodernity is setting up questions to which Christianity has answers, then rediscovering those answers may do both postmodernity and Christianity a world of good.

The Invisible Self

"As one casts out to sea in the contemporary world," writes Kenneth J. Gergen (1991), describing the postmodern psychological predicament, "modernist moorings are slowly left behind."

It becomes increasingly difficult to recall precisely to what core essence one must remain true. The ideal of authenticity frays about the edges; the meaning of sincerity slowly lapses into indeterminacy. And with this sea change, the guilt of self-violation also recedes. As the guilt and sense of superficiality recede from view, one is simultaneously readied for the emergence of a pastiche personality. The pastiche personality is a social chameleon, constantly borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available and constructing them as useful or desirable in a given situation. (150)

Gergen's observation of the postmodern psychological situation is marvelously perceptive, though his cheerfully naive assumption that "if one avoids looking back to locate a true and enduring self" the situation can be "properly managed" is considerably less useful. Given the growing pharmacological arsenal for anesthetizing "the guilt of self-violation," it would be naive to suggest that it cannot be done, but it would be even more naive to overlook the spiritual price to be paid for doing so. Modern psychology emerged, and put its stamp on the twentieth century, precisely because an increasing number of people were unable to manage properly the psychological house of mirrors Gergen so well describes. Symptoms of the psychological distress associated with this problem emerged centuries earlier, at the dawn of the modern age, and the spiritual and cultural shifts that gave rise to these symptoms are older still. The most obvious fact about the postmodern crisis of the self is that it is a historical phenomenon. With Professor Gergen's sketch of what he calls the "pastiche personality" fresh in our minds, we can perhaps detect its early manifestations in a few texts dating from the early seventeenth century.

A passage that bears remarkable likeness to Gergen's appears in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Tellingly, it occurs at the onset of Antony's great crisis in act 4 of the play.

With both his erotic desires and his political ambitions in ruins, Antony asks his attendant, not coincidentally named Eros, whether he, Antony, is still visible. To which Eros answers, "Ay, noble lord." But Antony, his ontological substantiality draining away, cannot be persuaded by such perfunctory reassurances. He proceeds to relate his psychological predicament:

Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish, A vapor sometime like a bear or lion, A towered citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon't that nod unto the world And mock our eyes with air ... That which is now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct As water is in water. My good knave Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body. Here I am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. (4.14.2-14)

Shakespeare's Antony is suffering from precisely the sort of self-dissolution about which Gergen remains so sanguine. Chameleon-like, Antony has begun to take on the form of whatever exerts an influence on him, but he is unable to regard the unraveling of his identity with Gergen's serenity. An exploration of the roots of Antony's ontological predicament, its origin in mimetic desire and the passions it awakens, would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say that his psychological disintegration was the reason for, and not the result of, the erotic and political misadventures that preceded it, the final collapse of which coincided with his eventual recognition of his plight. In the image of his curse we can see the portraiture of ours, for the crisis that is now looming was preceded and prepared for by decades of political and sexual hysteria, in the aftermath of which many are, like Antony, "borrowing bits and pieces of identity from whatever sources are available."

Misplaced Mimetic Desire

Antony and Cleopatra was probably first performed in 1607. Two years earlier in Spain, Cervantes had published part 1 of Don Quixote, and, as an actor was declaiming Antony's lines in London, Cervantes was at work on the second part of his novel, which was published in 1615. Cervantes' masterpiece is the story of a man suffering a milder form of the same spiritual and psychological crisis into which Shakespeare's Antony was slipping. The protagonist of Cervantes' novel is a man responding to a deep desire to imitate another. His predicament is less grave than Antony's for the simple reason that he has managed to keep one single model before him throughout his life, the fictional hero of contemporary novels of chivalry, Amadis of Gaul. Yet, like Shakespeare's Antony, the man from La Mancha has a moment of truth at which he awakes, not to a cloud that was dragonish, but to windmills and remorse.

After a life spent emulating his model, on his deathbed Don Quixote belatedly comes to his senses. Like Antony, he mumbles about misty shadows and the loss of his identity. He says to those attending to him in his extremity:

My judgment is now clear and free from the misty shadows of ignorance with which my ill-starred and continuous reading of those detestable books of chivalry had obscured it. Now I know their absurdities and their deceits, and the only thing that grieves me is that this discovery has come too late, and leaves me no time to make amends by reading other books, which might enlighten my soul.... Now I am the enemy of Amadis of Gaul and of all the infinite brood of his progeny. Now all profane histories of knight errantry are odious to me. I know my folly now, and the peril I have incurred from reading them. Now, by God's mercy, I have learnt from my own bitter experience and I abominate them. (935-36)

Realizing that his life has been misspent slavishly imitating a model whose escapades were unworthy of such devotion, Don Quixote doesn't renounce imitation, as his modern heirs would, rather he bemoans the fact that his imminent death leaves him so little time to make amends for having read and imitated certain books by reading and imitating certain other books, those that might enlighten his soul. Don Quixote, or rather Cervantes, realizes that imitation is an unavoidable fact in human life, the crucial choice being whom one takes as a model. He sees the folly of having modeled his life on novels about chivalrous knights rather than on the lives of the saints, which is surely what Cervantes means by books that enlighten the soul. Don Quixote's deathbed conversion consisted of his realization that he had imitated the wrong model. His response was to want to imitate the right ones.

(Continues...)



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