Erotic Friendship

Eroticism is one thing. Possessiveness is another thing altogether. Any admixture of the latter utterly corrupts the former. “Possessive eroticism” is an oxymoron.

In this post, I will attempt to explain the great — indeed, defining — difference between the two, the erotic and the possessive. I may not use those exact terms in what follows, but if you as readers give the matter due thought as you read, you will discern the relevance of what I do say to that distinction.

*     *     *

In Jesus, the power of God is the power of love, of bearing fruit in another’s life. Judge them by their fruits [see Matthew 7:16-20]. That is, so far as they are fruitful they share in the power of God and the life of God. He who abides in me is the one who bears much fruit [see John 15:5]. This bearing fruit in the lives of others constitutes the essential identity and being of men in the kingdom of God. I am what I generate in another. My giving is my being. Thus arises the conflict between Jesus and the world, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil. For in this world, identity consists in being able to draw a circle around some bit of reality and possess that bit of reality as your own and no one else’s.[1] 

Arthur C. McGill was born in Canada in 1926 but became a Congregational Christian minister as well as an academic theologian and philosopher in the United States, where he died in 1980. It was only after his death that appreciation and fame for his work deepened greatly and spread widely.

The passage above is from a sermon McGill entitled “The Ascension,” which he delivered at St. John’s College in Cambridge, England on May 18, 1969. In that passage McGill points to the unbridgeable gap that separates the being of the human being who has come to dwell in  “the kingdom of God”  from the being of the same human being who has fallen into “the kingdom of evil.”  

In one line of what I’ve quoted above from McGill, he cites verse 5 of chapter 15 in the New Testament Gospel according to John. In the New International Version and various other translations that verse reads as follows: "I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing."

To expand upon what is at issue in that verse and to end this first section of today’s post I will offer another translation of something also attributed to John. This time, however, it comes from one of his  “letters” rather than from his “Gospel”:

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.                                                                          — 1 John 4:16-18 (NIV)

*     *     * 

In the ancient Greek language used by such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle who lived during the same broad era that koine (“common” Greek) was widely spoken in the lands of the Near East and used in the writing of the Christian “New Testament,” there were four different terms that are typically translated by “love.” Those four are eros, philia, storge, and agape.

Besides “love,” each of those four classical Greek terms has other common translations. Eros is commonly taken to mean “to be in love with, to desire passionately.” Philia is taken to mean “friendship or affection for.” Storge is regarded as the sort of “familial love” that parents have for their children, children for their parents, or siblings for one another. Finally, agape is taken to be “disinterested or selfless unconditional regard for.”

Commonly in occidental or “Western” literature, those are taken to be four distinct and typically incompatible sorts of love. Most pointedly, in such literature it is common to distinguish sharply between eros and the other three.

In most interpretation of Christian thought and scripture, for example, a sharp distinction is drawn between eros and agape. The former is taken to be anything but “disinterested.” Rather, is almost always equated with a love that is deeply “interested” — what is more, interested precisely in a sexual way.

That, however, is at best an arbitrary limitation. It is itself no more than a sexually fixated interpretation of the truly erotic. In truth, eros is far more than that.

The Eros Farnese, a Pompeiian marble statue thought to be a copy of the colossal Eros of Thespiae by Praxiteles, Attic sculptor of the 4th century BCE 

*     *     * 

In his dialogue The Symposium Plato depicts a banquet at which occurs a friendly exchange of extemporary addresses between a number of noted Athenians, including Plato’s great teacher, Socrates. The Greek general and statesman Alcibiades and the famous comic playwright Aristophanes both speak before Socrates, who delivers the final oration. The topic agreed upon for all the speaches is the nature of  “love” in the sense of eros.

Anyone who has not read Plato’s Symposium should read it. Anyone who has read it should read it again. Anything worth reading, after all, is worth reading over and over again and again, as time and the spirit move one.

Anyone who reads or rereads The Symposium will read how, in Plato’s rendering of Socrates’ speech, the latter attributes what he has to say about love to the woman  philosopher Diotima of Mantinea. It was she, Socrates asserts, who taught him the true nature of Eros, the god of love — most especially about the nature of the gift of love that Eros shoots into humans with his arrows from his bow.

Diotima agrees that eros is indeed a desirous striving after the beloved. What is more, says Diotima as Socrates presents her, what eros loves and stives desirously for is the beautiful.[2] More specifically, eros is that love which desires, she says, “to beget in the beautiful.”

*     *     *

I have added the emphasis to the word beget in what I have just cited at the end of the preceding section, because the crux of what I really have to say in this post myself is that the “begetting” at issue in eros may indeed be the bringing forth of physical children — as it is whenever that begetting involves sexual union — but it does not have to be so. There are, it is important to know, many, many other ways of begetting besides sexual acts, and many, many other types of what is begotten besides the children brought forth through such sexual union.

What it is that eros desires to beget in the beauty to which it finds itself compellingly attracted might also be no more and no less than thought for example.

*     *     *

In truth, it is in just such non-sexual cases that eros stands revealed in its relationship to philia, that “friendship towards” or “affection for” whomever or whatever one affectionately befriends. That is precisely why and how there can be, and with great frequency are, many “erotic friendships” to borrow from my title for today’s post.

*     *     *

May that thought itself beget ever more thought in you, my dearest readers and friends — toward all of whom I feel the greatest erotic attraction! 

[1] Arthur C. McGill, Theological Fascinations: Volume One, a collection of sermons by McGill edited by David Cain (Eugene: Oregon: Cascade Books, a division of Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007), p. 119.

[2] I will leave it to readers to read—or read again—the account of beauty in the Symposium. I also invite those same readers or re-readers to consider carefully what I say about beauty in my post “Dread and Astonishment,” which I posted on this site on a little less than one year ago, on April 22, 2024.

Uprooting Ourselves

Israel in exile is in statu nascendi,[1] a situation which is parallel to their wanderings in the wilderness. The Exile is the wilderness of the nations, where there is no sense of being rooted to the land or any adherence to a state. [. . .] Ezekiel, the prophet of the Exile, is convinced that putting down roots in the state and in the earth was misguided. Therefore, he completely uproots the tree of the nation from the old earthly kingdom and — in a monstrous inversion of the laws of natural growth — replants it with roots pointing upward. [. . .]

But it is incorrect to rank the Jewish nation in Exile as an exception. It is true that the Jews in Exile are a nation without land, but — and this is the decisive factor — they are surrounded by nations in a similar position. Exile is not just the fate of the Jews but of the whole Aramaic world. [. . .] The Aramaic nations were unable to put down earthly roots, but had to anchor themselves spiritually. The Jewish synagogue is only one of the national churches in the Aramaic region which is a home for the nation. The church-based nations of the Aramaic world are united in their faith. God is no longer revered as the Baal of a particular place; rather, everywhere that believers assemble in “synagogues” is home. In the Aramaic region, the criterion for belonging to a particular homeland is one of faith. [. . .] Apocalypticism is a phenomenon of the people and becomes in many of its features the common spiritual heritage of the whole Aramaic Orient. Apocalyptic literature is written to awaken mind and spirit, regardless of divisions. While the canonical scriptures of individual church nations are national, the apocalyptic writings are literally international. They encapsulate everything which makes feelings run high

The above passage is from Occidental Eschatology.[2] That is the title of the English translation of Abendländische Eschatologie, the doctoral dissertation of Jacob Taubes (1923-1987). Taubes was born in Vienna to a Jewish rabbinical family, and was himself ordained a Jewish rabbi in 1943, when he was only twenty. Three years later, in 1946, he earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, with the full manuscript of his dissertation, a greatly shortened version of which was published in the original German version in 1947. The citation above comes from the English translation of that shortened text, which translation was published more than sixty years after the German original.

Taubes and his Jewish family themselves left Austria in 1937, in effect exiling themselves to Zurich in neighboring Switzerland, when Jacob’s father was appointed chief rabbi there. That was the year before the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria into Germany, and the Taubes’ move allowed them to survive the Nazi onslaught against the Jews.

Jacob himself was appointed a rabbi in 1943, four years before the original publication of his doctoral dissertation. A year after that publication, he moved to the United States to take up a position offered him at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He eventually also taught in Jerusalem, then back in the U.S. at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. He died in Berlin, Germany, in 1987, at 64 years of age.

The story of his life is itself a story of being uprooted, but also sending his own roots upward, above earth and into heaven, to speak as the passage above says, and as Ezekiel also already said long ago.

Jacob Tauber

*     *     *

What Taubes observes and also attributes to Ezekiel is that the members of the Jewish nation throughout their history — and, to give two other similar examples, the indigenous nations of North and South America sent into exile by the Europeans who invaded those continents, as well as all enslaved members of the diverse African nations and their descendants  — have wandered together across countless lands, and precisely in such wandering have been heralds of a genuinely universal international community of all communities, as it were. Sent into the wilderness to wander their way in exile, such nations are already now the coming of that very “eschatological” community of us all: all us humans together, each for each and all for all.

That apocalyptic — which word in its own etymological roots just means “revelatory” — moment when the time of the clock itself ends and an altogether different time begins has already happened. Indeed, it has already happened, is still happening now, and will happen again, time after time forever more. It has happened, is now happening, and will happen again to us all, which demonstrates that, whether we know it ourselves yet or not, we human beings are all exiles.

By being uprooted and living one day at a time as uprooted and in our uprootedness, all of us exiles are wandering together in the wilderness. Let us all pray to be given eyes to see that in our universally shared exile we are all rooting ourselves no longer by sending our roots to entangle with one another below ground, but rather by sending those roots up above us, into heaven, to entangle us all with one another on earth, under heaven, and before the divine (to borrow a formulation from Heidegger).

What a deal for a bunch of “us”!

*     *     *

As attentive readers of this blog will already have heard in attentively reading today’s post from its very beginning, the title of this post is ambiguous. Such attentive readers will already know very well how I like to make many of my titles ambiguous in just that way.

On the one hand, “uprooting ourselves” can mean pulling up and out our very roots. On the other hand, “uprooting ourselves” can mean rooting ourselves upward, ethereally,  into heaven.

Those same attentive readers will understand, as well, why I followed up my preceding post entitled “Resurrection Now!” with this one, entitled “Uprooting Ourselves.” They will also understand why I have entitled my next post to come “Erotic Friendship.” Indeed, they will already understand how — and where — all three posts entwine their roots together.   

[1] In statu nascendi means “in the state of being born.”

[2] Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, translated by David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009),  pp. 24-26.

Resurrection Now!

            [. . .] No honest Old Testament prophet ever promised eternal joy to his nation save on the other side of disaster. Much less can an honest New Testament prophet, using the cross of Christ for his understanding of human fate, predict for men and societies immortality without judgment. To show up as clearly as may be the potentiality of catastrophe in our lives is as much a function of reason using revelation in our day as in any ancient time.

            Yet in the light of the revelatory occasion the Christian discerns another possibility; it is not his own possibility in the sense that it is implicit in him. But it is possible to the person who reveals himself in the historic occasion as the lord of life and death. It is the possibility of the resurrection of a new and other self, of a new  community, a reborn remnant.

The above citation comes from “Reasons of the Heart,” the third and next to last chapter of Richard Niebuhr’s book, The Meaning of Revelation.[1] Richard Niebuhr was the younger brother of Reinhold Niebuhr. Both Richard and Reinhold were important Christian theologians. Reinhold, the elder brother, is most widely known for authoring what is called the “Serenity Prayer,” which is used widely, including often in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step communities.

The citation immediately below comes from the fourth and last chapter of the same book by Richard, the younger brother. That chapter is entitled “The Deity of God”:

[. . .] Revelation is not a development of our religious ideas but their continuous conversion. God’s self-disclosure is that permanent revolution in our religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith. It is revolutionary since it makes a new beginning and puts an end to the old development; it is permanent revolution since it can never come to an end in time in such a way that an irrefrangible knowledge about God becomes the possession an individual or a group. Life in the presence of revelation in this respect as in all others is not lived before or after but in the midst of a great revolution.[2]

It was not until fall of last year that I first read The Meaning of Revelation, and when I first read the passage cited first above, at the start of today’s post, it struck me that the “resurrection” at issue not only in that passage but also in the Christian Bible and Christian tradition themselves, is not an event in what could be labelled clock-time, the time of datable historical occasions that occur once and then sink into the past. That is the sort of time in which, for example, in 732 at the battle of Tours Charles Martel defeated the Moors, to use an old line. Rather, it struck me, the resurrection at issue is something the happening of which is permanently recurring, occurring not “in” some already constituted time but rather in such a way as to “set out or forth” time as such, that is, as truly revealing just “what” time itself truly “is, was, and ever will be once and again forever,” as it were.

The same revelation about resurrection that so struck me when I read the first citation above, struck me anew yet again when I read the second citation above some fifty pages later. What dawned on me when I was reading the first passage dawned on me yet again when I read the second one — just as the sun dawns anew every morning.

*     *     *

What calls out to be kept in mind here is the difference between chronological time, from Greek khronos, and what we might call kairotic time, from Greek kairos. Those were the two words and senses of “time” in the culture and language of the ancient Greeks — from whom, be it noted, the entire occidental tradition of thought called “philosophy” also  derives.[3]

The Greek noun khronos means time in the sense of a defined, measurable temporal  extension, such as someone’s lifetime, a season of the year, a year itself or multiples thereof, decades, centuries, millenniums, and so forth. We might well put the point this way: khronos is clock time.

In contrast, the Greek term kairos means an opportune, decisive moment of critical change. We might well put it colloquially that kairos is the time when the hour has finally struck and the bell has been rung. It is the moment when conditions are there for the accomplishment of crucial action. As Wikipedia puts it: “In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.” In other words, kairos is always now!

Thus, according to its etymology, kairos is the “fit” time for happening as such. It is a moment of vision, when all becomes clear and arranges itself in its full entirety. When such a moment at last occurs, nothing has changed — that is, no one thing or combination of things has been altered — yet everything has changed.

One can often hear that very refrain in Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve-Step Groups concerning what has happened when someone “bottoms out” in their addiction, thereby reaching what in the book Alcoholics Anonymous and elsewhere in Twelve-Step literature is called “the turning point” and “the jumping off point” where, if and only if they do indeed take a turn and make the jump, they are “reborn,” to use the very word used in that same literature.

Such turning points, such jumping off points, are kairotic moments of vision.

Kairos, the ancient Greek god of the opportune moment

*     *     *

The sun is new every day.

                                    — Heraclitus

This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.

                                                                                    — Maya Angelou     

The words resurrection and rebirth at root say the same thing. The former derives from the past-participle stem of Latin resurgere "rise again, appear again." The latter derives ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bher-  “to carry,” which comes also and especially to mean “to bear children.”[4]

The sun itself is resurrected each day. It is reborn daily.

That Heraclitus, born in Asia Minor in the Greek colony of Ephesus in Ionia sometime during the 6th century BCE, and Maya Angelou, the African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist who was born and died in the United States during the 20th century CE, could see to share that same observation is proof that both were once visited by Kairos, god of the opportune moment.

Neither Heraclitus nor Maya Angelou let that moment of vision pass. Instead, they simply spoke the truth that moment had given them eyes to see and ears to hear.

So, I pray, may Kairos — like the sun — come right now yet again ever anew to us all.

Let Kairos come!

[1] Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1941), pp. 130-131.

[2] Ibid., pp. 182-1983

[3] The word philosophy, heard to its etymological roots, means “the love (Greek philein, “to love,” in the sense of feeling “friendship or affection for/toward”) of wisdom (Greek sophia, “wisdom”). Just as in ancient Greek there are two different words for “time,” so are there two different words for “love”: philos and eros. I will explore that latter distinction and the relationship between those two senses of “love” in my next post on this blog, “Erotic Friendship,” which I will post two weeks from today, on March 10, 2025.     

[4] That not all children so borne are infant animals will be one thing under consideration in my next post, “Erotic Friendship,” set to go up two weeks from today, on March 10, 2025.

The Scott in Me

Debates on Scottish education happened in the past, say between 1820 and 1930 and maybe on three major occasions a fight to stave off the move towards specialism, a kind of a rearguard action. Slowly but surely the English university system was creeping in, in place of the traditional generalist approach of the Scottish system. It’s not some airy-fairy abstract notion. The English system educated people for functional roles, preparing the way for “specialists” who would be more useful in the marketplace, for business. But what this leads to is a kind of general ignorance: you lose your ability to make a judgment, so if you want to know something, call in an expert. The Scottish approach more concerned itself with educating people as citizens, introducing young people to philosophy was considered basic, questions on first principles, the “meaning of life” debates and so on. So if you are used to thinking about this, that and the next thing then you’re better capable of making decisions and judgments; in other words you can think for yourself. 

                                                                  — James Kelman[1]

James Kelman

My father’s mother was herself born of a French-English mother and a Scotts-Irish father, so I always knew I was in some small part Scottish. Until reading the above remarks from James Kelman, however, I never realized how dominant that small genetic part has always been in me. Since the youngest age I can remember, I have always thought for myself, which I’d say in the light of those remarks shows how much Scott there is in me!

I can further attest with certainty that such a strong Scottish component in me is anything but the product of the so-called “education” system to which I was forced to be subjected ever since the age of five. It was at that age that the laws of the state of Colorado, where I was born, raised, and still live, mandated that I be enrolled in Kindergarten.

From the very first day until the end of what seemed like an endless school-year, I hated Kindergarten. I most especially hated being made daily to mold clay with my hands, an enterprise I found stomach-churning. In the early days of my Kindergarten confinement, whenever the churning grew strong, as it always did, I would go up to the Kindergarten teacher’s desk. I would tell her — truly enough — that I was sick to my stomach and needed my mother to come and get me and take me home.

After a few days of my repeated complaints and requests for parental assistance, my Kindergarten teacher wised up and refused to have the school office call my mother to come get me. Instead, that teacher scheduled a parent-teacher conference with my mother, a conference at which I was also required to be present.  In my very presence at that conference, that school-teacher told my mother that if I didn’t “change my attitude” by the start of the next schoolyear,  I would never even graduate from the first grade.

I knew even then that what my Kindergarten teacher said was full of shit — though I did not express myself to myself in exactly those terms at the time. I knew that whatever horse-manure the school-system dished out to me, I’d easily get through all their silly “tests” and  “requirements” until I got through high school, as state laws dictated.

One of the few school-teachers for whom I ever had any respect was my fourth grade teacher, who had the decency and good sense to realize I was ahead of the rest of the class, and who saw to it that I was allowed to skip the fifth grade and go immediately from fourth to sixth. To this day, I am grateful to that school-teacher for letting me get out of the school prison-system one year early.

Bless her memory!

*     *     *

In my final year in elementary school, my English teacher assigned each of us students to do a report to the class on some subject that interested us, and to invite our mother to attend our presentation. What I chose as my topic was the Thomas Pendergast Political Machine of St. Louis, Missouri, during the 1930s — a machine which, among other things, processed Harry S. Truman, the eventual United States President.

I chose that topic because I had recently gone with my family to see the 1956 movie The Boss, staring John Payne in the Pendergast-inspired title role. I was enthralled by the movie and its topic, and read up on Pendergast and his political machine.

When I read my report to the class, my sixth grade school-teacher scowled at me and my mother. When the class-period was over, that teacher took my mother and me aside. She said to us that my mother must have put me up to making such a report, and probably wrote most of it.

Of course, she, like my Kindergarten teacher years earlier, was full of shit.

*     *     *

When I eventually went to high school, during my sophomore year I realized that the call to think to which I had whole-heartedly responded ever since early childhood went, in the European cultural tradition, by the name of philosophy. When that realization sank in, I knew that I was called to do “philosophy.” My vocation — which etymologically literally means just such a “calling” — was to become a “philosopher” myself.

I was not stupid, which is to say willfully blind or ignorant.[2]  So I soon realized that the only way in our sick and sorry capitalist society I would ever be able truly to heed my calling and pursue my vocation  to become a “philosopher,” would be if I went all the way through college and university classes to get a Ph.D. degree in that subject, and then managed to land a university professorship somewhere to teach others to philosophize. Accordingly, that is precisely what I proceeded to do.

I ended up teaching philosophy at the university level for forty-five years, the last forty-two of which were at the University of Denver (DU).  I officially became DU Professor Emeritus of Philosophy when my retirement became official in 2014.    

*     *     *

Way to go!

[1] James Kelman, All We Have Is the Story: Selected Interviews 1973-2022 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024), pp. 62-63.

[2] See my discussion of “willful blindness” in my book The Irrelevance of Power, available through the “Store” at the top of this blogsite.

The Stability of Resistance

NOTE TO READERS: Today’s post consists mainly of citations from diverse sources. All the citations give us food for thought, especially when read together, as I strongly  encourage readers of this post to do.

Now the workshop in which we shall diligently execute all these tasks is the enclosure of the monastery and stability in the community.

— The Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 4[1]

 Heard to its roots, the title I have given this post is redundant. So heard, stability and  resistance say the same thing. That resounds clearly between the lines of the following citations from the Online Etymology Dictionary, from which — as regular readers of this blog know well — I often take citations:

stable (adj.): mid-12c., "trustworthy, reliable;" mid-13c., "constant, steadfast; virtuous;" from Old French stable, estable "constant, steadfast, unchanging," from Latin stabilis "firm, steadfast, stable, fixed," figuratively "durable, unwavering," etymologically "able to stand" (from PIE *stedhli-, suffixed form of root *sta-  "to stand, make or be firm").

resist (v.): late 14c., resisten, of persons, "withstand (someone), oppose;" of things, "stop or hinder (a moving body);" from Old French resister "hold out against" (14c.) and directly from Latin resistere "to make a stand against, oppose; to stand back; withstand," from re- "against" (see re-) + sistere "take a stand, stand firm" (from PIE root *sta "to stand, make or be firm"). Of attacks, invasions, etc., 1530s.

            In short and in sum, to be stable is to resist, and to resist is to be stable. I ask all readers of this post to do all they can to follow the call of that thought: to hearken to that call, to hear it, and to heed it.[2]

*     *     * 

What follows are two English versions of one and the same passage from the Gospel of Matthew in the Christian Bible, commonly called the “New Testament,” the original of which was written in ancient Greek:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.

                                               — Matthew 5:38-39 (NIV)

Your ancestors have also been taught, 'Take an eye in exchange for an eye and a tooth in exchange for a tooth. ' However, I say to you, don't repay [ἀντιστῆναι (antistēnai)] an evil act with another evil act. But whoever insults you by slapping you on the right cheek, turn the other to him as well.          

              — Ibid. (TPT)

To follow the path along which hearkening, hearing, and heeding the deep call of the terms stability and resistance leads us, we should also give the same attention, understanding, and obedience to the following command, which is there to be read in a different Christian Gospel:

He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” ).

                            — Mark 5:41 (NIV and various other versions)

The word koum in the above passage is the Hebrew and Aramaic קום, which means  "to stand, arise, get up." In cases of combat that term connotes standing, arising, or getting up against or in resistance to whomever or whatever one is combatting. However, such “standing/arising/getting up”  in all its uses, including that “combative” one, does not mean the same thing as “striking back.”

*     *     *

Indeed, refusing to “strike back” by slapping the slapper back in turn, and instead turning the other cheek when one is slapped in one cheek is precisely a way of “getting up” or “standing up” for oneself as oneself. It is a matter of one’s offering stable resistance to the slapper, rather than becoming just another slapper in turn!

That is clearly to be heard when one reads with deep thoughtfulness and wholly opened ears the two following citations, the first of which comes from elsewhere in the Christian Bible and the second of which comes from a recent text addressing yet another different passage from that same Bible:  

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.  

                   — James 4:7 (Revised Standard Version [amid others])

Even in his act of cleansing the temple, Jesus is nonviolent: he doesn’t harm people, and what he does represents an act of civil disobedience toward a corrupt religious system.

     — Thomas Oord and Tripp Fuller, God After Deconstruction[3]

*     *     *

Here are yet two more citations, the first from a book I wrote myself over a decade ago and the second from a different book by a different author. Both texts were published around the same time, and neither citation concerns the Christian Bible as such:

[W]e need to free ourselves from the notion that resistance is a reactive formation, dependent for its very meaning on the thing that it resists, which thing in that sense takes priority over all resistance to it. We need, instead, to recognize a peculiar priority of resistance over what it resists.

                                                                   —The Open Wound[4]

Surviving genocide, by whatever means, is resistance.

— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States[5]  

Finally, what follows are yet two more citations, with which I will end this post. The first citation is from another recently published book, and the second from the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation during the sixteenth century of the Current Era. Both attest to the stability that resistance always requires, and the resistance that stability always manifests:

The Zionist project pushing settlers into Palestine is [. . .] responsible for the displacement of Palestinians. As of today, 1.8 million people in Gaza (close to its entire population) have been displaced just since the escalations starting October 7, 2023. [. . .] There are now approximately 7.2 million Palestinian refugees and people displaced within the borders of Israel who have not been able to return to their homes and villages. As many of us have now watched this ethnic cleansing and genocide unfold right before our eyes via social media, we are no strangers  to the faces of immense trauma and suffering. The trauma of this kind of separation from family and place lives in people’s ancestral bodies and is passed down through generations. The reverberations of this level of state violence will be felt for generations to come and, if history tells us anything, will only become fuel for further resistance.

                  — Eliana Rubin, Taking the State Out of the Body[6]

Here I stand, I can do no other.

                                    — Martin Luther[7]

Martin Luther, portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1528

[1] Line 78 of Beedict’s Rule.

[2] See my post, “Hearken, Hear, Heed,” which went up on this blog-site on May 24, 2021, where it can be accessed through the “Archive” at the top of this site.

[3] (Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2024) p. 163.

[4] The Open Wound: Trauma, Identity, Community (© Frank Seeburger, 2012), p. 80. Copies of this book are available in the ‘Store” at the top of this blog-site.

[5] (Boston:  Beacon Press, 2014), “Author’s Note.”

[6] (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024), pp, 58-59.

[7] The last line of Luther’s collected works, which were first  issued under his supervision.

Freedom from Attribution

We should all always practice abstinence from attribution — that is, from tracing events back to what we take to be their causes. However, abstaining from such attribution is no easy thing to do.

After all, attributions are like food: We can’t do without them. What is more, they are also like sex: No one wants to do without them. Accordingly, the no usage criterion for abstinence — the criterion that applies, for example, to recovered alcoholics who maintain continuing abstinence from alcohol, never consuming it again after they once sober up —  cannot be applied to abstinence from attributions.

In what, then, does the latter sort of abstinence, the sort we should all always practice toward attributions, consist?

It consists in refraining from investing oneself in one’s attributions, whatever they may concern. Put positively, it consists in maintaining neutrality towards all the attributions we make, regardless of their content.

We cannot stop ourselves from making attributions: we make them incessantly. Furthermore, if we made no attributions we would have no science or technology, nor for that matter any art or religion. In fact, without attributions we would not even be able to accomplish daily tasks of the simplest sorts. From infancy, a large part of individual human mental development is the process whereby we first learn to make attributions (to connect things together as cause and effect), and then go on to learn more and more sophisticated strings of attributions. A large part of societal progress also occurs in much the same way. Thus, it would be suicidal of us, both individually and collectively, to attempt simply to stop making attributions, even if we could.

We can’t. All that anyone needs to do to become convinced that we can’t is to try. Even to be able to keep our minds free of attributions for a moment or two is an incredibly difficult task. Devotees of any of the many forms of meditation—from Zen breath counting, to the Hindu use of mantras, to contemporary Christian “Centering Prayer”—may literally practice meditation for years before they can detect any significant diminution of mental attributive activity. Nor does it ever cease altogether, except for relatively brief periods followed by a return to everyday consciousness, which is replete with attributions.

So we cannot completely stop making attributions even if we wanted to, which we don’t. Fortunately, however, we don’t have to.

In order to free ourselves from addiction to attributions we do not have to give them up altogether, any more than the food addict needs to give up eating or the sex addict needs to give up sex. Rather, we must learn to relate to our attributions differently, just as the food addict must learn to relate to food differently, the sex addict to sex differently.

We must learn, in effect, not to care about our attributions. We must learn a healthy, positive indifference toward them. Once we learn such indifference, we can just let our minds go right on attributing in even the wildest ways, since our attributions will have lost their power over us. We will be free in relationship to them, taking them or leaving them alone as the situation requires of us. We will be just like the recovered food addict who is free in relationship to food, having learned how to eat naturally, taking food when hungry and leaving it alone otherwise.

Shunryū Suzuki was a Japanese Zen master teacher (or “Roshi”) who came to the United States in the late 1950s and stayed to found the Zen Center in San Francisco. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), which has become a classic, he tells a parable of how to deal with a sheep or a cow. What he says applies especially to unruly sheep or cattle, we might add. “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow,” writes Suzuki, “is the way to control him” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, page 32).  

Shunryū Suzuki

*     *     *

There is nothing new in what Suzuki says. In fact, it is an ancient insight. The same insight is repeated throughout history, in one spiritual tradition after another, with one formulation or another.

So, for example, we can take the case of Taoism, an ancient, indigenous Chinese religion. The central Taoist idea for escaping universal human bondage is to practice the “way” (the meaning of the term tao) of what is called wu-wei. That means “nonaction” or “not-doing.” However, Taoist nonaction is not to be confused with simple Western inaction. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with a high degree of “action” in the ordinary Western sense. It is not a matter of passivity or quiescence. Rather, it is a matter of not investing oneself in one’s action, and through that investment giving one’s very own action power over oneself.

The same basic idea is familiar, as we have already seen with Suzuki, from Zen Buddhism. In its encounter with Buddhism (brought into China from India), Taoism helped to form Zen; in the latter, too, the practice of “nonaction” is central. If anything, in Buddhism in general, whether Zen or not, the enslaving role of what we are here calling “attributions” receives even greater emphasis than it does in Taoism. According to basic Buddhist doctrine, the three ultimate sources of universal bondage are desire (or attraction), hatred (or aversion), and ignorance. It is nothing but the interplay of those three that gives rise, in fact, to the whole of what is called Samsara, the ever spinning wheel of worldly or phenomenal being. Ultimately, Samsara is nothing but a gigantic illusion created by that interplay—an illusion in which we find ourselves trapped without any apparent way out. If we are ever to escape, we must first come to an experience of “enlightenment” in which we see through the illusion. Then we must practice a rigorous discipline of moment-by-moment “mindfulness” in which we detach from the continuous stream of our experience—that is, in which, once again, we deliberately hold back from investing ourselves in that experience, thereby feeding our desire, hatred, and ignorance. Only in that way can we ever attain liberation.

From Hinduism, the Bhagavat Gita tells the story of the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna, who has incarnated as Arjuna’s charioteer and servant. Pausing before the beginning of a monumental battle between opposing forces of the same divided family, Arjuna repents of his own profession as a warrior and is struck by a disabling lethargy. In a poetic dialogue Krishna eventually convinces Arjuna that he must go ahead and join the battle, in accordance with his duty as a warrior. He must even be willing to kill and wound beloved members of his own extended family, since that is what the moment requires of him in his station in life. But he must do so with complete detachment, if he is to avoid acquiring any negative karma (inevitable moral consequences, to the agent himself or herself, of any kind of action: a debt that must eventually be paid, if not in this life, then in some subsequent incarnation). He must act as though he were not acting — that is (once again), act without investing himself in his actions through his own attributions. In that way, his actions will attain a purity of motivation, or, more precisely, a purity from motivation. That is, they will be free of the self-centeredness that otherwise sneaks into even the most apparently altruistic actions, introducing a foreign particle into the underlying altruistic intent of the action, a particle that adulterates the whole no less surely than a little bit of vinegar will sour a cup of milk. Only Krishna’s way of completely disinterested action escapes such adulteration—and with it, the karma that would otherwise inevitably accrue.

Especially in the Sufi tradition, Islam contains similar ideas. So does Christianity. With regard to the latter, it is above all in Christian monasticism and mysticism that the necessity of practicing detachment, to use one term for it, is often emphasized.

As codified by St. Basil the Great in his rules for monastic life, by which Eastern Orthodox monasticism is still governed, and by St. Benedict for Western Christianity, the monastic life has been carefully organized constantly to impel monks in the same direction of divesting themselves of their attachments. Whether living in community or in solitude, monks throughout the centuries have striven toward that same goal. From Evagrius of Pontus (345-399 CE), who had a lasting influence on both Latin and Orthodox Christian monastic thought and who borrowed from the Greek Stoics the idea of apatheia or freedom from the passions to Thomas Merton in the 20th century, Christian monks have called for detachment as the way to spiritual perfection.

From Origen to Meister Eckhart, from St. Teresa of Avila to St. Therese of Lisieux, from the anonymous author of the 14th century Cloud of Unknowing to Edith Stein in the 20th, Christian mystics, whether monks or not, have done the same.

We all should follow such paths, choosing whichever tradition is appropriate to us

Meister Eckhardt

NOTE TO READERS: The preceding post is a slightly revised version of a section in the penultimate chapter of my book Addiction and Responsibility—which book may be purchased in the “Store” at the top of this blog site. Also, after this post I am taking my usual holiday break. My next post will not be until Monday, January 13, 2025.

The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity -- Part Two: Humanity Traumatizing

 Prelude 

   Trauma can — and after a certain point surely will — cause disability. However, we need to be cautious about all of this, because it’s easy to use this information in a way that reinforces the medical model and carceral systems. Trauma is a failure of community — and government — not a problem inside an individual. [. . .]

                              — Katie Tastrom, A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice[1] 

Not only does humanity suffer trauma, but also humanity inflicts trauma. Thus, humanity is always both traumatized and traumatizing. As the first — how humanity traumatizes — was my focus in “Part One” of this combined two-part post,  which went up two weeks ago on October 28 of this year, so my focus in “Part Two,” which I am posting today, will be on the second — how humanity traumatizes.  

Katie Tastrom

 *     *     *

Part Two: Humanity Traumatizing  

The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives the following definitions for the noun trauma:

                                                1

a: an injury (such as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent

b: a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury

c: an emotional upset

2

an agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma

In turn, the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us this about the origin of that same word:

trauma (n.): 1690s, “physical wound,” medical Latin, from Greek trauma “a wound, a hurt; a defeat,” from PIE *trau-, extended form of root *tere (1) “to rub, turn,” with derivatives referring to twisting, piercing, etc. Sense of “psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress” is from 1894.

The impending ecological catastrophe bears witness to how extensively humanity has been and continues to be an appallingly destructive force rubbing nature raw and turning it into a wasteland. We, humanity as a whole, are a destructive force attacking nature, inflicting deep wounds upon it from which—here on earth, at the very least—it is unlikely ever fully to recover.

Humanity has inflicted deep and destructive “injury” upon the “living tissue” of vast numbers of organisms that grow in nature. Think, for example, of the systematic and intentional “de-forestation” of vast stretches of the earth’s surface that for millennia provided rich soil for the roots of trees and plants to sink themselves deep and grow strong and tall. Vast forests have all around the globe been replaced by cities, highways, grazing lands, and cultivated millions of acres to be worked over to exhaustion by agricultural combines in pursuit of never-sufficient monetary profits for a small percentage of the human population.

Of course, wars are just another instance of trauma that humanity causes. In the case of wars, however, it is not just some “other,” such as plants and animals of varied species, that is traumatized. Rather, it is also human beings themselves. The bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, for example, did not just kill off plants and non-human animals, but also masses of human beings themselves.

As Katie Tastrom suggests in the lines I cited above at the very beginning of my “Prologue” to today’s post, humanity today also inflicts trauma upon itself by way of the entire consumer corporate system itself causing and ceaselessly expanding what she calls “disablement,” by which she means the way in which segments of the population are split off and “othered”—most especially by way of being placed, one way or another, in one or another form of prison, whether that be in the form of jails or in some other form, including that form constituted by public schools, placed in such prisons by the coercive power (as I call it) that defines itself precisely in such “othering.”

That combined devastation variously wrought on itself as well as on other beings such as plants and non-human animals is one major way in which ”the trauma of humanity” is the trauma that humanity itself is. It is  one way in which humanity is not only itself subject to trauma, but also engenders massive trauma, thereby itself constituting the greatest conceivable “agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma,” to hearken back to the dictionary’s second major sense of the word trauma: one way in which “we,” humanity, not only undergo trauma, but also inflict it.     

*     *     *

Psychoanalysis, I would suggest, can […] thus help us to think, and perhaps witness, a new kind of event that is constituted, paradoxically, by the way it disappears.

                — Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History[2]

People’s capacity to speak, Freud was to find, depended on their childhood experience (people grow into their past, Freud realized, more than they grow out of it).

      — Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst[3]                                          

The Tower-Keeper: [. . .] Everywhere we must continually turn back to where we always already are.

      — Heidegger, “The Teacher Meets the Tower-Keeper at the Tower-Rise Door”[4]

Until and unless we are brought to face ourselves, we, both collectively and individually, will continue to be not only traumatiz-ed but also traumatiz-ing.

Please do all you can to face that fact!

Cathy Catch

[1] Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024, p. 180.

[2] Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p. 77.

[3] New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 29.

[4] In Gesamtausgabe 77: Feldweg-Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), p. 176, in my own freely interpretive translation (the italics are in the original German text).

The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity -- Part One: Humanity Traumatized

Prelude to This Two-Part Post 

            We could understand the entire theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle not simply as the explanation of trauma from the distance of theoretical speculation but as the passage of the story of the child in a theoretical act of transformation. For what is the story of the mind’s attempt to master the event retrospectively if not the story of a failed return: the attempt, and failure, of the mind to return to the moment of the event? The theory of repetition compulsion as the unexpected encounter with an event that the mind misses and then repeatedly attempts to grasp is the story of a failure of the mind to return to an experience it has never quite grasped, the repetition or an originary departure from the moment that constitutes the very experience of trauma. And this story appears again as the beginning of life in the death drive, as life’s attempt to return to inanimate matter that ultimately fails and departs into a human history. Freud’s own theory, then, does not simply describe the death drive and its enigmatic move to the drive for life but enacts this drive for life as the very language of the child that encounters, and attempts [in the “fort-da” (”gone-returned”) game, as Freud dubs it] to grasp, the catastrophes of a traumatic history. 

             — Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival,” 

In reading those words from Cathy Caruth’s opening chapter of her book Literature and the Ashes of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) I myself experienced the return of a call of thought that I had not managed to grasp with any clarity before that moment. This two-part post will eventually explain that experience, at least to those given ears to hear.

My purpose in writing this two-part post is the same in spirit as the purpose Adam Phillips attributes to psychoanalysts in general and Freud in particular in the following passage from Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 7-8):

The psychoanalyst is a historian who shows us that our histories are also the way we conceal the past from ourselves[,] the way we both acknowledge it and disavow it at the same time (to disavow it is, one way or another, to simplify it; to acknowledge it is to allow complication). After “the great Darwin,” as Freud called him, another of Freud’s heroes, we are creatures of an appetite to survive and reproduce; and because we are desiring creatures in an uncomfortable world we are, like all animals, endangered by our desire and therefore self-protective. But unlike other animals, who because they have no language have no cultural history, we also feel endangered by our histories. There is nothing we want to protect ourselves more from, in Freud’s view, than our personal and family histories. For many people the past had become a phobic object, concealed in sentimental nostalgia and myths of race and national history. Through psychoanalysis — which was clearly a response to these increasingly insistent contemporary questions — Freud tried to work out the ways in which we are unduly self-protective; the senses in which modern people suffer from their self-protectiveness.

*     *     *

The phrase “the trauma of humanity,” which makes up the second half of my title for this two-part blog post, can be understood in two different ways, depending on how one takes the preposition of. One can take “of” in the phrase at issue to mean “happening to or befalling” but one can also take it to mean “which is.”

Taken in the first way, the phrase “the trauma of humanity” would mean the trauma which befalls humanity, within which phenomenon would be included such symptomatic out-breaks of what humanity has repressed as last century’s two World Wars or this century’s current war in Gaza. That is how I will take my title “The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity’ in “Part One,” today’s first part of my two-part post.

Thus, in today’s post following this three-part “Prologue” (such repetition being appropriate, given the content of the unified whole of both parts plus this prologue) I will take that phrase to mean the symptomatic return belonging to the repressed trauma that strikes collective humanity as such. That symptomatic return has been striking humanity over the ages, occurring in such events the 30-Years War, to add a third example to the two I’ve already given — of the World Wars and the war in Gaza. At issue is the trauma which repeatedly besets humanity, in all such symptomatic recurrences.

Battle of the Somme, which took place July-November 1916, during World War I

*     *     *

Then in “Part Two” of this two-part post — the part I will put up in two weeks, on November 11 of this year — I will address, not the trauma that recurrently besets humanity, but the trauma that humanity itself is.

Toward the close of that second part of this two-part post, I will consider how the two, humanity traumatized, and humanity traumatizing fit together in one whole.  

*     *     *

Part One: Humanity Traumatized

Trauma compulsively repeats itself, as Freud taught. It continues compulsively to repeat itself until it is finally faced as the trauma it is, that is, until the repression that is the flip-side of the coin of trauma, is brought to a close, and the traumatic event is at last acknowledged as the trauma it is.

Indeed, to bring the one traumatized finally to face and acknowledge that one’s trauma is the very thing at which such repetition aims. As I wrote myself at one point in “Civilization, Empire, and the Holy,” a short essay of mine published a few years ago in After Empire, the 2020 edition of A Beautiful Resistance, the annual journal of Gods & Radicals Press (Salem, Oregon: p. 103), “the last compulsive repetition of a trauma is the one that finally brings the whole traumatic series of repetitions to its goal, so that at last the traumatized can cease compulsively avoiding the trauma, and, in finally facing it, recover health and wholeness (to be redundant, since those two words, heard to their roots, say the same).”

Such repetitions of trauma constitute, as it were, “after-shocks” of the original shock of trauma, as I put the matter in my own 2020 book The Irrelevance of Power (available in the “Bookstore” at the top of this blog-site). Those after-shocks of repetition will continue to occur until the one traumatized at last stops repressing the memory of being shocked in the first place by the original traumatic occurrence.

In short, trauma always returns.

Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II in August 1944

*     *     *

                        Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. 

                                                       --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Perhaps the gods have long been out to destroy us. Perhaps it is for that purpose that they sent us empire, in order to drive us mad first.

Seen in that light, empire, along with the civilization to which it belongs, appears as our collective historical insanity—humanity gone mad. In turn, seen in the same light, that madness itself is sent in order to set us up for ultimate destruction. It is sent to lead us eventually to the Apocalypse, in at least one meaning of that term, according to which it signifies a world- and time-ending catastrophe. 

Other lights than Longfellow’s can be cast, however.

Seen in one such alternative light, empire still appears as madness, but the ultimate purpose of that madness is no longer to prepare us for destruction. Its ultimate purpose is, instead, to bring us to salvation.

Seen in that different light, empire still appears as our collective historical insanity. Yet now it appears as an insanity, a madness, sent us—or, rather, into which we have been sent—in order to bring us eventually, at the end of a long an arduous journey along a meandering path that often ends in thickets and requires us to retrace our steps, back home again to true and final sanity. Perhaps our insanity is ultimately sent us by the gods so that we can at last, after such a long journey, come back again to the very same place where we began, only to know it now for the very first time (to adapt a line from T. S. Eliot).

That is how I begin my essay “Civilization, Empire, and the Holy,” already cited above. In the above passage I am addressing the trauma upon collective humanity that has kept on compulsively repeating itself for millennia in the forms of war, conquest, genocide, racism, and all the other disasters that have struck “the human race,” to borrow the English translation of the French title Robert Antelme gave his account of being arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau — a book still very much worth reading with care, by anyone who cares at all about anything at all worth caring about.

In the above passage from my own essay I am suggesting that the first bead, as it were, on the long string of beads making up by all the long and still ongoing history of repetitions in the form of wars and the rest — I am suggesting that the bead that begins that so far unending string of beads is the emergence of “civilization” itself, that very form of human gathering that took place in what are called cities, a word that derives from the Latin civitas, to give that Latin term its nominative form.

*     *     *

All of that certainly is worth serious thought, at any rate.

A child caught in the Gaza Strip War in October 1923