1. We want to be at home, and we want to be free. We want to fit into something larger than ourselves, something real and meaningful and permanent; and we want to control our destiny, to create something meaningful and to express our unique personality. We want to be a part, and we want to be a whole.
1.a. We are parts, and we are wholes. This statement must not be a simple contradiction, because we human beings, aware of being parts and wholes – we are real and we exist. This apparent contradiction certainly names a tension, a problem that lies at the heart of our humanity, and therefore (I would say), at the heart of reality itself, at least as far as we humans can know.
2. Moreover, our desires for home and for freedom, since both lie at the heart of our humanity, cannot be completely extricated from each other.
(The longing for freedom, or the desire to realize oneself as an autonomous whole, is another way of saying the desire to be divine and thus to belong to or be identified with what is real, with what is beyond human construction and human domination. Let us say that in its most radical form the longing for freedom is the blasphemous longing to be God, which is perhaps the nearest and furthest desire from the pious longing to be with God. But even the greatest possible impiety of longing to be God, the self-sufficient source of all reality, cannot avoid a Divine longing for a world to love and be loved by. Even the freedom of divine wholeness cannot be disentangled, as far as we can know, from the longing to be a part.)
3. But some few are more articulate, imaginative, intense than most in their desire for home/freedom: thinkers, poets, founders/statesmen (i.e., ambitious, movers & shakers).
3.a. This decisive fact of human inequality constitutes the political dimension of reality. It complicates everything: “home” is in some measure a human (historical) construction; some play a bigger role in this than others. Thinkers, poets, founders build our homes — and destroy them or undermine them. But where do they live?
4. In the ordering of human existence with respect to home and freedom, everything depends on the relation between the ordinary desire for home and for freedom, and the extraordinary longings and productions of thinkers, poets, founders. For these are inextricably connected. The ordinary is certainly conditioned by the extraordinary: those who would be happy just to be left alone will not be, and if they are, this can only be because of some arrangement of the affairs of the extraordinary, “ambition counteracting ambition,” or whatever. Less obvious to the extraordinary, they also depend upon the ordinary: the meaning of their thinking, the possibilities of imagination and of founding – these may soar far above the common, but they are launched from the common earth and never leave its orbit. The creator of every new possibility begins helpless, in some womb and some home.
August 28th, 2009 | 2:28 pm
And, how does the quest for immortality effect the question of ‘home’ and ‘freedom?’
August 28th, 2009 | 5:00 pm
“IT” was once said in so many words, Be perfect like My Father in Heaven is perfect.
So simple to say…]
August 29th, 2009 | 12:59 pm
The part and whole tension is, of course, fundamental, and we’re really confused by it. To give one low-level example, our sophisticates speak of being autonomous–or being self-determining wholes that refuse to be reduce to parts. But those same sophisticates also say Darwin explains it all: That means that we’re each part of the species and nothing more. This contradiction causes us to believe that to be a “whole” is to be free from nature–including from the self-deceptive instinct at the foundation of love And to be a part of nature is to be merely a part or the sucker. But the truth is surely much more subtle: We can only become a whole by being a part; we’re wholes as social, relational beings; as citizens, creatures, parents, children, friends and so forth. We, as wholes, are aware of our natural directedness and dependencies and can act “authentically”–or in view of what we really know–as parts without surrendering our “personality” or “individuality.” The Christian believes, for example, that his love for the personal, relational God doesn’t require the surrender of his personal identity or being a particular being with a name. It really is possible to believe that you’re unique and irreplaceable without thinking that you’re all alone in a hostile environment. That doesn’t mean you’re ever fully at home (Bob gives one reason why), but your experiences of homelessness both presuppose and are directed toward a home.
August 29th, 2009 | 3:54 pm
Not that I want to waste any time railing about Darwin whose soulful excursions into the beauty of the natural world have a spark of the divine in them but I think I have to start drinking again because I find myself agreeing with Lawler.
August 29th, 2009 | 3:58 pm
DW reminds me of the classic country tune that goes something like this: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” Every time I agree with myself I start drinking.
August 29th, 2009 | 10:13 pm
Not to be argumentative, which is not in my nature, Darwinism represents one of those ideologies that floated to the top during the past century and is best defined as “spiritually decadent,” if I might quote Voegelin who proceeds to identify it as a modern attempt to replace the legitimate philosophical inquiry of reality with “phenomenalism.”
Still it’s nice to see D.W. and Peter getting along so well.
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