7 comments

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  hewhocutsdown

  11 months ago

  um....what?
  
  I'm pretty sure I understood each individual sentence, but I'm not sure I grasp what the overall intent of the article is. Sorry, Scott, can you help?
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  Ted

  11 months ago

  Scott,
  
  Thanks for this. I fear this post will get overlooked in the (admittedly sexier and more accessible) discussion on "The Style of Subversion", but I think the two posts are more related than might meet the eye, since both deal with the contradictions of identity construction.
  
  Your penultimate paragraph raises a couple of questions: One, have you read any Ernest Becker (particularly Denial of Death)? His work as an anthropologist took something like Heidegger's speculation on death as a starting point for assessing human behavior, particularly human violence. Dan Liechty's Reflecting on Faith in a Post-Christian Time connects Becker's work with the idea of the fetish for an interesting perspective on Christian origins.
  
  Two, you mention the Tibetan Buddhist expectation of ongoing consciousness, but what about conventional Christian understandings of the afterlife? Or St. Benedict's reminder to his monks to contemplate their own death? I bring these up not to scold you for leaving them out, but to ponder: what are the similarities? Or the differences? Do you ever wonder why the Tibetan Book of the Dead is so full of explicit detail of the postmortem experience of consciousness (if indeed that's what it is about) while the Bible has very little arcane information on such things (depending, I suppose, on how you read it)?
  
  Those, at least, are questions that come to mind.
  
  Ted
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  hewhocutsdown

  11 months ago

  The fear, or lack of fear, of death does speak volumes. Having grown up influenced by 'goth' culture, and having dealt directly with death on a few occasions, I am ok with it for the most part. But for many people, my wife included, any frank discussion of death or mortality comes across as uncomfortable and morbid.
  
  I think that may be a cultural artifact, but it has personal implications.
  
  Thanks for the expansion Ted...Scott, it just took a couple reads, sorry about the confusion yesterday.
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  Ted

  11 months ago

  I'm not sure how much I expanded -- I mostly riffed on something that was probably not the main point. Scott is way ahead of me in continental philosophy.
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  hewhocutsdown

  11 months ago

  But you gave me the hook to connect to Scott's piece. So for that I thank you.
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  mountainguy

  11 months ago

  In fact, Jesus was branded as witch, lunatic, and even terrorist.
  
  Very interesting article. I hope to start reading Heidegger in a not so long time
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  ScottMaxwell

  11 months ago

  Sorry it took me so long to respond to some of the comments made on this article. I actually didn't even think about the response aspect of adding content to the web. Ted, thank you so much for adding a reference to Becker's very interesting book The Denial of Death. I read that quite some time ago, but it fits so well with what I wrote here. Also a book written by Stephen Mulhall titled Philosophical Myths of the Fall.
  Sorry it took me so long to respond to some of the comments made on this article. I actually didn't even think about the response aspect of adding content to the web. Ted, thank you so much for adding a reference to Becker's very interesting book The Denial of Death. I read that quite some time ago, but it fits so well with what I wrote here. Also a book written by Stephen Mulhall titled Philosophical Myths of the Fall.
  
  The Denial of Death is interesting and related because in my article I tried to show the similarities between Heidegger's thought and Augustine's in relation to the existential being toward death that finite creatures must struggle with. In this struggle, the self must self reference itself to ask the great questions of life: "Who am I?", "What do I want to be, or become?" The Christian response articulated by Augustine, is of course, I am a Christian, a follower of Christ. (Nicene Creed) I choose my identity, not because this is my nature, but because I must make that 'leap of faith' in the Danish philosopher's words Soren Kerkegaard. Once I choose to be a Christian then I choose a kenotic transformation of sorts.
  
  The second point quickly, is the book by Mulhall. Mulhall basically takes the idea of the Fall in the Garden as a lens in order to understand what Wittgenstein and Heidegger were up to. They were up to no less than understanding this idea of 'Original sin' and how man sets out to over come this blemish on their ontological being. In essence man is tainted with only a cursory understanding of themselves because Adam and Eve's eyes were open to full ontological disclosure until they BOTH moved away from God by not following his words without complete self emptying (kenosis).
  
  
  myspace.com/SamArche
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