Tag Archives: Plato

Misplaced Concreteness Imperils Our Soul

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Psychologist Irvin Yalom noted that the fear of death keeps people from living.  By that he meant that the infantile fear of death…a necessary fear at earliest stages of development…can keep people from actually living if it is never addressed.  The ego uses this death fear to tyrannize people into living an unexamined life, to prefer the security of a self-serving, sterile environment where we can plod through our lives, “like kittens given their own tails to tease.” (Goethe)

And here is how Shakespeare addressed the same concern in Sonnet 146:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live

 thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Shakespeare knew the dilemma of misplaced concreteness, taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  Plato explained this with his allegory of the cave.  Jesus understood this also when he declared, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”  Jesus knew that being a slave to the “cave images,” taking them to be real, would lead one to live a life which was merely a caricature of what it is to be human.  He knew that succumbing to the temptation of merely reading our script…even those that include intense versions of spirituality…would be merely to live a life of bondage, bondage to the ephemeral while excluding the soul.

Interiority is a missing dimension of modern life.  This is because we take thoughts to be the “thing-in-itself,” which parallels our tendency to take social, political, and material things on a surface level and fail to look beneath the surface into the machinations of the heart…i.e. the “soul.”  Shakespeare knew that making this mistake was to let our soul, “pine within” from neglect, even as we paint the exterior dimensions of our life a gaudy, “costly gay.”  This is most manifest in my country’s current political situation where political leaders are mired in a horrible morass of ego and greed while we lamely avow, “Well, it will all workout” or “God is in control” rather than recognizing that the “morass of ego and greed” that our government is acting out for us right now is a projection of the hollowness of our entire way of life…including our religion.

 

See following link for commentary on this sonnet—https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/sonnets/146/

Julia Kristeva, Semiotics, and Violence Against Women

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I recently referred to one of my favorite writers, Julia Kristeva, and her work in the field of linguistics and semiotics. And I’m glad I did so as one of by blog-o-sphere friends find her intriguing and has done some research on her which she shared with me and has stimulated a renewed curiosity of Kristeva on my part. Semiotics is the field of studying the intricacies of language but not a superficial study as in an ordinary language class. Semiotics, particularly as approached by Kristeva, delves into the heart of the linguistic process, down into the “guts” of the verbal process and uses her background in linguistics, philosophy, religion, and psychology to explore this murky, frightening, even terrifying dimension of the human heart as it was constellating. For the heart is comprised of images, feelings, conflicted drives, and emotions which most of us spend our lives oblivious to, even though this dimension of the heart drives our lives even without our awareness of it. This is the unconsciousness, a domain of “feeling” and these “feelings” control us more than reason and even determine how we use our reason. This is the reason that advertising always aims first at our feelings and this certainly true about political advertising..

Kristeva also focuses much of her work on women and the ravages that patriarchy has done on this “fairer sex”, and continues to do so today even though in our culture the tyranny of patriarchy has been diminished in the past hundred years…somewhat! I’m going to share with you my friend “V’s” recent thoughts on this dimension of Kristevan thought. I warn you, don’t read this if you are not open to having patriarchy subjected to a keen analytical mind. And, men, don’t be frightened! The views of Kristeva and her ilk…and of Ms. “V”…merit our consideration and do not have to threaten our masculinity. These views actually can help us participate in a cultural redefinition of “manhood” which our culture and our world so sorely needs.

 

Btw, I’ve been reading about Julia Kristeva this morning. Thanks for turning me on to her. I had never read any of her works. Also been watching some of her video interviews today. I’m now watching the video lecture “The Need to Believe and Desire to Know” on YouTube. What really intrigued me was what I found on her Wikipedia page. I quote:
“It has also been suggested (e.g., Creed, 1993) that the degradation of women and women’s bodies in popular culture (and particularly, for example, in slasher films) emerges because of the threat to identity that the mother’s body poses: it is a reminder of time spent in the undifferentiated state of the semiotic, where one has no concept of self or identity. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.”

I also see a similar symbolism in the crucifixion of Christ. Jesus had feminine qualities which is why most females can relate to him. Even images depict him with a feminine quality. During his time, it was a ‘shame’ for men to have long hair. Women had to cover their heads (hair). A mother image was created in Jesus using mother type symbolism, such as bosom, milk, birth, etc. James W. Prescott, Ph.D. said:

“The dualistic philosophy and theistic theology of gender morality, has had and continues to have devastating consequences for woman and her children. As death of the body is necessary in some religions for salvation, re. the Crucifixion, so too is the death of woman (and her body) necessary for the death of sin and wickedness.”

I’ve searched high and low to find the origins of the love/hate relationship with the mother/women, especially among males, and I found it interesting that nature has created a ‘natural’ repulsiveness towards the mother among her male children as they grow older. This occurs in order to keep sons from mating with their mothers.

I have a dear friend from Wales, and a couple of years ago, he shared a video with me. I’ve tried to locate it but have not been successful to date and he’s forgotten the name of the video. It shows this man searching via spiritual and religious avenues to find that ultimate connection he is driven to experience. It shows him taking part in all the religions and spiritual disciplines and yet still continues to search Towards the end, you see stairs, but don’t know what’s at the top until the end. The man starts up the stairs, and the closer he comes to the top the younger he gets. Then you see this gray cord, and he turns into an infant. The cord is an umbilical cord. At the top of the stairs was his mother. Subconsciously, he was longing for that connection he once felt with his mother when he felt security, when he felt intimacy, nurture and love. When he felt one with his mother.

Back to the Wiki page, it states: “Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic. In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a “speaking subject,” and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called the symbolic and is contrasted with the semiotic in that it is associated with the masculine, the law, and structure.

According to Schippers (2011), where Kristeva departs from Lacan is in her belief that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than arriving at a fixed identity, the subject is permanently ‘in process’. ”

“Kristeva is also known for her adoption of Plato’s idea of the chora, meaning “a nourishing maternal space” (Schippers, 2011). Kristeva’s idea of the chora has been interpreted in several ways: as a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child, and as the temporal period preceding the Mirror Stage. In her essay “Motherhood According to Giovanni” from Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva refers to the chora as a “non-expressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement as it is regulated.” She goes on to suggest that it is the mother’s body that mediates between the chora and the symbolic realm: the mother has access to culture and meaning, yet also forms a totalizing bond with the child.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

Check this new study out. Scientists find the cells of children in the mothers brains, showing the connection between mother and child is deeper than they once thought. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-discover-childrens-cells-living-in-mothers-brain