Acclaimed philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues it
is. She’s the latest sage to raise the alarm against higher education's growing
obsession with knowledge you can take to the bank.
According to Kant, all of philosophy boils
down to four questions:
1.
What can I know? (Epistemology)
2.
What ought I to do? (Ethics)
3.
What may I hope? (Religion)
4.
What is man? (Philosophical Anthropology)
Any answer to the fourth question, any theory
of human nature, implies answers to the other three.
THE
ARGUMENT FROM HUMAN NATURE
In
Aristotle's logic this form of argument is known as a syllogism:
Premise
1. Man is naturally ________.
Premise
2. Man ought to be able to act naturally
(corollary:
Society ought to be organized to allow this.)
Conclusion:
_________ is the good society (for it allows man to be natural) and
________ is a bad society (for it forces man to act against his nature).
Fill
in the blanks.
Martin Buber, "What is Man?"
in Buber, Between Man and Man, especially Part II: From Aristotle to
Kant (available at Frost Library Reserve Desk on 2 hour
loan)
Some questions: How does Buber distinguish between an epoch of
homelessness and an epoch of habitation? Do you think we are currently living in
'homelessness' or in 'habitation', or both? Why?
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL:
IF GOD IS OMNISCIENT, OMNIPOTENT, AND BENEVOLENT,
WHY DOES HE PERMIT
INJUSTICE AND THE SUFFERING OF THE INNOCENT?
Plato's Allegory of the Cave (modernized)
William Barrett, Irrational
Man - A Study in Existential Philosophy
Some questions: What are some of the main concerns of
existentialist thought, as presented by Barrett? How would you describe Barrett's idea of the
'encounter with nothingness'? What are the similarities and differences between
Barrett's concept of 'homelessness' as compared to Buber's presentation of
this concept?
"Every
age projects its own image of man into its art." William Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 59.
Here are some links to modern artists, a number
of which are mentioned in Barrett's chapter "The Testimony of Modern
Art," in his Irrational Man, pp. 42-65.
How would you describe the images of humans in
the paintings and sculptures of the various artists below? What do these
images tell us about the human condition in the twentieth century and beyond?
Edvard Munch's
The Scream Information on
Edvard
Munch from the
WebMuseum,
Paris
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778)
“The
first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine,"
and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the founder of civil
society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and
misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or
filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this
imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong
to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality (1754)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel,
1770-1831
Hegel taught us to understand the history of ideas in terms of a
dialectical development in which men react against the views held by their
predecessors and correct any one-sidedness in these views by going to the
opposite extreme that, alas, is equally one-sided. --W. Kaufmann
None
of the major thinkers of the past two centuries, including Freud, can be
understood without some understanding of Hegel.
"Hegel's
treatment of Christianity in his last years has often been misunderstood. Among
religions, he considers it supreme insofar as it seems to him to come closest to
the truth comprehended ultimately in his philosophy. ... In its relation to
philosophy, however, religion is as a child compared to a man: it is an
anticipation in less developed form of what finds mature expression in
philosophy. ... When Hegel avails himself of Christian categories, he never
implies acceptance of the Christian faith in the supernatural, in miracles, or
in the incarnation and resurrection; he merely finds the Christian myths more
suggestive and appropriate anticipations of his philosophy than the myths of
other religions. ... That he ... became a precedent for theologians like Tillich
and Bultmann is undeniable. But if one should consider the procedure of all
three reprehensible, there are still important differences in Hegel's favor.
What he did very occasionally,en
passent,... they have made
their full-time occupation. ... Above all, far from treating the latest
philosophy as a remarkable anticipation of Christianity, provided only that the
latter were radically reinterpreted on the basis of this philosophy, Hegel
presented the very opposite picture: in his system Christianity was treated as
an anticipation in mythological form--on the level of vague notions and
feelings--of truths articulated in philosophy." Kaufmann, W. (1965).Hegel:
A Reinterpretation.New
York: Doubleday, section 65, pp. 271-275.
Dialectical Method
Although the conception of the dialectic as a
three-step movement fromthesistoantithesisand
finallysynthesisis
Fichte's rather than Hegel's, this model legitimately articulates the Hegelian
dialectic provided one understands that both thesis (the immediate) and its
negation (which is not necessarily its contrary) are cancelled and yet preserved
and elevated in the synthesis (mediation) that represents their sublation
(sublimation). The idea is not as complicated as it sounds. Berger's conception
of the social construction of (social) reality as composed of the three
"moments" of externalization, objectivation and internalization is derived from
Hegel. Here the thesis "Man makes society" gives rise to the antithesis "Society
makes man." This looks like a contradiction but Berger offers us a dialectical
synthesis in which we can understand that both are true on a higher level.
Similarly, inBeing and
Nothingness(1943) Sartre argues
man is radically free. But in theCritique of Dialectical Reason(1960)
he depicts man as determined by a wide range of social, economic, historical,
familial and psychological conditions. Has Sartre changed his mind? Is he in
contradiction? No, for a proper understanding of Sartre's philosophy is a
dialectical one in which by interrogating the categories "free" and "determined"
we can come to understand that on a higher level human beings are both.
On the recent revival of
interest in Marx due to the latest 2007-8 crisis of capitalism, see the
Introduction to
Pelz, W.A. (2012),
Karl
Marx: A World to Win. New York:
Prentice-Hall. Though not required reading for the course, this book may be
purchased in ebook format here: EbookSee also:
D’Amato,
P. (2006). The Meaning of Marxism. Chicago: Haymarket.
Eagleton,
T. (2011). Why Marx was Right. New Haven & London:
YaleUniversity
Press.
Leon
Trotsky (1904), on “substitutism,” prior to hisconversion to
Bolshevism: “Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party
organization at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole;then the Central
Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single
‘dictator’substitutes himself
for the Central Committee.”NashiPoliticheskieZadachi,
Geneva,
p. 54.
Isaac Deutscher (1949), Stalin: A Political Biography: "He [Stalin]
knew that the amalgamated opposition could not but founder on the scruple that
had already defeated Trotsky, that it would not carry the struggle beyond the
ranks of the party. The opposition would not even dream of constituting itself
into a separate party; for it accepted the axiom that only a single party could
exist in the Soviet state ...." Pelican, 1966, p. 309.
Long before the meltdown, one woman tried to warn about a threat to the
financial system.
See how Alan
Greenspan’s “religious” faith in unregulated “free market” capitalism (“the
Invisible Hand”; “trickle down economics”; “greed is good”; etc.), a faith bred
by his devotion to the philosophy of Ayn Rand,
brought a nation and much of the world to its knees, and how a group of
patriarchal males stifled the warnings of a courageous woman who was right.
SECOND
TERM MATERIAL
Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy(1965)
Some questions to consider when
reading Berger:
1. Why is religion and its decline of such concern for
sociologists? 2. Was Berger right to assume ever-intensifying
secularization as a continuing feature of modern Western society? Would
McGrath (2004) agree?
3. How would you describe Berger's method or approach to the
study of religion?
4. If relativizing is the essence of
sociological perspective, is Berger consistent in his relativizing
method?
5. What is an "epistemologically privileged
position"? Does Berger epistemologically privilege
"anomy"?
For a critique of Peter Berger’s theory and the related ideas of
Ernest Becker, see: Carveth, D. (2004).
The Melancholic Existentialism of
Ernest Becker. Free Associations Vol. 11, Part 3, No. 59 (2004): 422-29.
In "Discreet Charm of Nihilism" (The New York Review of
Books, 45, 18, November 19, 1998), Czeslaw Milosz
writes: "Opium for the People: Religion, opium for the
people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it
promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a
transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness
after death--the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed,
cowardice, murders ... we are not going to be judged."
"For many, the trauma of
Auschwitz can only mean the supreme triumph of
atheism: who could believe in God in the face of such horrifying acts of
violence and brutality?
It is only fair to point out that
those who planned the Holocaust, and those who slammed shut the doors of the
Auschwitz gas chambers, were human
beings--precisely those whom Ludwig Feuerbach declared to be the new 'gods' of
the modern era, free from any divine prohibitions or sanctions, or any fear of
future divine judgement. ... If any worldview
is rendered incredible by the suffering and pain of the twentieth century, it
is the petty dogma of the nineteenth century, which declared that humanity was
divine. ...
Nearly two hundred years'
experience of the moral failings of this humanity-turned-divinity have been
enough to convince most that it has been a failed experiment. While some
continue to argue that
Auschwitz
disproves the existence of God, many more would argue that it demonstrates the
depths to which humanity, unrestrained by any thought or fear of God, will
sink."
'Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and
morally,' wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers
and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why
the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong.John GrayThe
Guardian,
Saturday 15 March 2008
Thou canst not prove
thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art
mortal--nay my son,
Thou canst not prove
that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in
converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy
proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven:
wherefore, thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the
sunnier side of doubt.
--Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92),
Ancient Sage
"To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth
million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science
simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's
possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we
simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have
made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will
find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped
for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have
argued that Darwinism must be God's method of action)."
--Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)
"It is a melancholy truth that most of us are wrong most of
the time about the way the world is going. We watch it, we hear about
it, we experience it, and usually we don't know what it means. Of all
the smug and foolish delusions that were part of conventional wisdom when I
was young in the middle of the 20th century, two stand out in memory.
One was the idea that nationalism was a 19th century concept, on its last
legs. The other was that religion, as a force in worldly affairs, was
slowly but inevitably fading away. At times I was stupid enough to
believe both of these preposterous fallacies; but then, so was nearly
everyone else."
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer(February
4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was aGerman
Lutheranpastor,theologianandmartyr.
He was a participant in theGerman
resistancemovement
againstNazismand
a founding member of the Confessing Church.
He was involved in plans by members of theAbwehr(the
German Military Intelligence Office) toassassinateAdolf
Hitler.
This led to his arrest in April 1943 and execution by hanging in April 1945, 23
days before the Nazi surrender. His view of Christianity's role in the secular
world ("religion-less Christianity") has become very influential.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): Poet,
Educator, Literary Critic
Wm. Barrett's discussion of Hebraism and Hellenism is based on
Arnold's
differentiation of these contrasting roots of Western Civilization. Barrett
sees the history of Western philosophy as reflecting the dominance of the
Hellenistic emphasis upon right thinking and upon knowledge (gnosis).
He views existentialism as the resurgence of the Hebraic emphasis upon right
action and of the moral as distinct from the intellectual virtues. (The
complete text of Culture and Anarchy, including the section on Hebraism
and Hellenism, is available online.)
Søren Kierkegaard,
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Martin
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
Søren Kierkegaard 1813-1855
"...What
I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am
to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every
action. The thing to do is to understand myself, to see what God really
wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me,
to find the idea for which I can live and die."
From:
A Kierkegaard Anthology. Ed. R. Bretall.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 4-5(original italics). This anthology has a good selection from
Kierkegaard's main works.
"If
a human being were a beast or an angel, he could not be in anxiety.
Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety. ... Anxiety is
freedom's possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely
educative, because it conumes all finite ends and
discovers all their deceptiveness." The Concept of Anxiety.
"But
Abraham had faith and therefore he was young, for he who always hopes for the
best grows old and is deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the
worst grows old prematurely, but he who has faith -- he preserves eternal
youth." Fear and Trembling.
"Each
generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human
from a previous one. In this respect, each generation begins
primitively, has no other task than what each previous generation had, nor
does it advance further ..." Supplement to The Concept
of Anxiety..
"The
biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly
as if it were nothing: every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife,
etc. is bound to be noticed." The Sickness Unto Death.
See: May,
R. (1950). The Meaning of Anxiety, chapter 2, Philosophical
Interpreters of Anxiety, pp. 29-51.
New York: Norton, 1977.
Pdf. file here:
Rollo May on Pascal &
Kierkegaard
For a
much-needed critical assessment of Kierkegaard’s authoritarian approach to religious
faith, see: Kaufmann, W. (1959). From
Shakespeare to Existentialism. Princeton,
NJ:
Princeton
University Press, chapter 10, “Kierkegaard,” pp. 175-206.
Reading: Barrett,
Irrational Man,
Ch.
7, pp. 149-176.
Reading questions: Why is the problem of choice so important for
Kierkegaard? What is Kierkegaard's concept of 'subjective
truth'? How does subjective truth differ from relativism and objective truth?
What does Kaufmann see as the danger
inherent in Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective truth?
How do you feel about Abraham’s faithful
willingness to sacrifice his son?
Referring to Kierkegaard's 'stages on
life's way', would you define yourself as an aesthete, an ethical person, or
as a religious person? What does Kierkegaard mean by 'religious suspension
of the ethical '?
Nietzsche often expressed his thoughts in the form
of aphorisms, or short, compact sentences that captured profound insights
into the human condition.
A good selection of Nietzsche's works is
collected in The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. (New York : Viking
Press). This text should be widely available at a reasonable price in most
used and regular bookstores.
Nietzsche and Christianity An excellent source of Nietzsche's views on
Christianity can be found in his Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ.
(London: Penguin Books, 1968), especially the first 23 sections of The
Anti-Christ. Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals is
also useful, especially
SectionI. "'Good and Evil,'
'Good and Bad'.
(2) Kaufmann, W.
(1959). From Shakespeare to
Existentialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, chapter 11,
“How Nietzsche Revolutionized Ethics,” pp. 207-217.
KaufmannNietzsche.pdf
Some
questions to consider: What does Nietzsche mean by his famous phrase ‘God
is dead’? What is Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality? Do you agree that the ‘will to power’ is an
accurate assessment of our current condition? Would you describe Nietzsche as a pessimist or a
realist? Why? What are the main points of difference between
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard?
How do ‘noble morality’ and
‘slave morality’ differ, according to Nietzsche?
Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism
remains one of the most influential philosophical projects of the twentieth
century, despite the controversy surrounding his political activities in the
1930s.
Reading:
Barrett, Irrational Man, Chp. 9, pp. 206-238. Reading
questions: Is Heidegger's philosophy atheistic, theist (mono or poly), agnostic, pantheistic,
panentheistic, or what? What is the distinction between 'being' and 'Being'? Why is this distinction
important for Heidegger? Why does Barrett fail to mention Heidegger's Nazi phase?
It is from Heidegger that Berger (1965) derives the concept of "marginal
experience" -- e.g., a brush with death, or the death of a significant
other, the shock of a natural disaster, or of emigration -- that can awaken one
from the state of self-alienation in the "nomos"
or socially constructed world and induce an "ec-static"
state. Like Pascal and Kierkegaard, Heidegger offers a critique of das
Man, the anonymous "one" who seeks escape from the existential
anxiety intrinsic to freedom and authentic selfhood as being-toward-death through
the distraction offered by social conformity, cliches
and "idle talk".
For an excellent critical assessment of Heidegger see: Kaufmann, W.
(1959). From Shakespeare to
Existentialism. Princeton,
NJ:
Princeton University Press, chapter 17,
“Heidegger’s Castle,” pp. 339-369.
Richard Wolin'sThe Heidegger Controversy - A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1993) is a good review of the issues surrounding Heidegger's philosophy and
politics.
From Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan
Ilych, section xii:
'From that moment the screaming began that continued for three days, and was
so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed doors without
horror. At the moment he answered his wife he realized that he was lost, that
there was no return, that the end had come, the very end, and his doubts were
still unsolved and remained doubts.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" he cried in various intonations. He had begun by
screaming "I won't!" and continued screaming on the letter O.
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled
in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless
force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the
executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt
that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what
terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to his being thrust into that
black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. He was
hindered from getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good
one. That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his
moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all.
Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder
to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light.
What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in
a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while he is really
going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction.'
Jean-Paul
Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir
(1905-1980)
(1908-1986)
Reading: Barrett, Irrational Man,
Ch. 10, pp.
239-263.
Is Sartre in contradiction in arguing that
we are both determined and free?
Explain the
difference between practical or positive freedom ("freedom to") and
psychological or negative freedom ("freedom from")?
How does Sartre
define being-in-itself and being-for-itself?
What is "bad
faith"? What is "good faith"?
Sartre says "Hell is other
people." Why?
Sartre says "Man is a useless
passion." Why?
What does Sartre mean when he argues that
man's "fundamental project" is to be God?
How does Simone de Beauvoir apply
Sartrean philosophy to the distinction between the genders?
Hazel Rowley's (2005) biography,
Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre, tells us a lot about the private lives of these existentialists,
especially their manner of dealing with other people and each other. Is
such information relevant in evaluating their thought? Is it only to
commit the ad hominem fallacy to suggest a possible connection between
the philosophy that God is dead and each individual a god-like legislator of
values and the shabby, hypocritical and exploitative way they lived their
lives? In the same vein, is the fact of Heidegger's nazism
irrelevant to an evaluation of his philosophy?
Some
links:
Carveth on Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir & Tillich:
"When the Thinker
Betrays the Thought".Review of Hazel
Rowley (2005), Tète-à-Tète :
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.Can. J.
Psychoanal./Rev.
Can.Psychanal. 15, 2 (Fall 2007): 362-368.
While
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943)
and Existentialism
is a Humanism (1946) reflect a
somewhat individualist focus (although ‘the look of the other’ is a central
category), his Critique of Dialectical Reason
(1960) has a far more systematically sociological orientation, reflecting
his attempt to work out an existential neo-marxism.
Stevenson &
Haberman (2004),
Ten
Theories of Human Nature, 4rth ed., chapter 8, pp. 156-175.Freud:
The Unconscious Basis of Mind This was left out of the 5th
edition. Stevenson and Haberman apparently didn’t
realize that psychoanalysis was enjoying a comeback, not least due to recent
brain research. See the couch coming back UP the escalator in the image
below.
For a superb, learned, respectful and yet critical and
corrective reading of Freud, see: Sagan, E. (1988).
Freud, Woman, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil. New York: Basic Books.
Sagan argues that the Freudian superego is quite distinct and formed much
later than the conscience that originates in the early, preoedipal
relationship with the mother.
Questions and Considerations:
What
is the difference between 'manifest' and 'latent' meaning in dream
interpretation? What therapeutic methods did Freud employ as he evolved his technique and why
did he abandon the earlier techniques in favour of free association?
Why
is Freud's "drive" (trieb) theory
problematic for existentialists?
In what
sense can it be said that Freud eventually added an existential element to
his drive-centered theory of religion?
If as
Erikson argued psychoanalysis is a theory of epigenesis,
why did Freud fail to evolve an epigenetic theory of religion? What
would that look like?
The
PBS Special on Sigmund Freud & C.S. Lewis on The Question of God
aired
on Sept. 15 & 22, 2004. A superb website accompanying the program
is
online here:
Freud's five main statements regarding
religion:
(1) "Obsessive Acts and Religious
Practices" (1907). S.E., 9.
(2) "Totem and Taboo" (1913
[1912-13]), S.E., 13. Both (1)
and (2) are also in Freud, The Origins of Religion, (London: Penguin
Books, 1990), pp. 31-41; 49-224.
(3) "The Future of An Illusion"
(1927c), S.E., 21.
(4) "Civilization and Its
Discontents" (1930a), S.E., 21.Both (3) and (4) are also in Freud, Civilization, Society and
Religion. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 179-241; 243-340.
(5) "Moses and Monotheism" (1939),
S.E.,
23; also in Freud, The Origins of Religion, pp. 239-386.
What
are the id, ego, and superego? How are they related to each other?
What are some of the ego's strategies to manage its conflicts with its three
harsh taskmasters (the id, the superego, and reality)?
Describe the Oedipus and castration complexes and their relation to superego
formation.
Newsweek
27/3/06Going
up?
Mind? Brain?
Freud in Our
Midst
On his 150th
birthday, the architect of therapeutic culture is an inescapable force. Why
Freud—modern history's most debunked doctor—captivates us even now.
May 05, 2006
Sigmund
Freud: The doctor is back in
On the 150th
anniversary of Freud's birth, science is proving he was right
Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter
humankind
Sigmund Freud contemplates a bust of himself, sculpted for his 75th
birthday by Oscar Nemon
It has often been claimed that
Freud presents a "pansexualist"
psychology.
Is this true?
Although few scholars credited his thesis at the time, in Moses
and Monotheism (Standard Edition 23), Freud (1939a [1934-8]) was
among the earliest writers to trace the Egyptian origins of biblical
themes.
The
cartoon on the left above appeared in an International Psychoanalytic
Association newsletter a few years ago. It appears to suggest the
superior attitude of the smug atheistic psychoanalyst who assumes that
"if only Jesus had had a good analysis he might have avoided all that
self-defeating crucifixion stuff." Can you imagine such a cartoon
featuring Moses or Mohammed on the couch? Note the portrait of Freud where in
an earlier era a Christian crucifix might have been found. Since one good
favour deserves another, the picture on the right is taken from the cover of
Paul Vitz's (1988) Sigmund Freud's Christian
Unconscious. If it appears to suggest an impossible synthesis,
Forster and I have argued that the Kleinian
development of Freudian psychoanalysis renders the integration of a
psychoanalytic with a biblical and existentialist anthropology more feasible:
Forster,
S.E. & D.L. Carveth (1999). "Christianity: A Kleinian
Perspective." Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis /Revue
Canadienne de Psychanalyse 7, 2 (Fall, 1999): 187-218.
Just
as Sartre attempted a synthesis of marxism and
existentialism, and some psychoanalysts have attempted to synthesize
psychoanalysis and Christianity, so an important group of psychoanalytic
writers (Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and others) have attempted
various syntheses of marxism and psychoanalysis, a
Freudo-Marxism or psychoanalytic-marxism.
Although it is not an easy read, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s
(1993), Psychoanalytic-marxism: Groundwork
(New York:
Guilford),
provides a masterful overview and attempted synthesis in this field that offers
a critique of domination in both society and the self. Terry Eagleton, writing
in the tradition of Christian socialism, points toward a synthesis of
marxism and a version of Christianity that views Jesus, who
advised the wealthy young man to give away all his worldly goods and follow
Him, as a prototypical communist (“It is
as difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle”). Given the existentialism intrinsic to
the Judeo-Christian tradition, it would seem that we have the basis for a
synthesis of important elements of Christianity, existentialism,
marxism and psychoanalysis. In addition to Eagleton’s
(2009) Reason, Faith, and Revolution:
Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven
&
London:
YaleUniversity Press) we have his latest
book (2011), Why Marx was Right (New Haven &
London:
YaleUniversity
Press). It seems a wide range of dialectical
thinkers are headed in the same direction.
“The
true revolutionary is motivated by feelings of love.”—Ernesto “Che” Guevara
In
light of his life as recounted in
Jon Lee Anderson’s
comprehensive biography, what are we to think of Che’s
statement about “revolutionary love”?
Gustavo
Gutiérrez Merino,O.P.,
(born 8 June 1928 inLima)
is aPeruvian theologian
andDominicanpriest
regarded as the founder ofLiberation
Theology.
Liberation
theologyoriginally
developed as a Christian response to the conditions in which a great part of the
Latin American population live. For Gutiérrez, the centre of the problem in
Latin America is sin manifested in an unjust social structure. The theologian
puts emphasis on the dignity of the poor.
Liberation
theology "has arisen out of the experience of the poor, the oppressed, the
"wretched of the earth" in Latin America, with whom [Gutiérrez] lives
six days each week."
