We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
[1] This Lost Generation lament for selves in search of authenticity is taken up by Catholic University of America’s Angela Franks in a deeply researched elegy for “the identity crisis in the West: the crisis of the subject that resists being fixed.” This is the rootless postmodern, unmoored, ungraced, unbeholden to anything fixed, prey to ephemeral blandishments, tabula rasa that is offered everything and embodies nothing lasting, solidly good or true. Hers is an accomplished inquiry into how Western philosophy has enabled this evanescent person to come about. Caveat emptor: it’s a resolutely philosophical treatise, deep, demanding and not for casual eyes. “Deleuze’s Spinogistic Nietzscheanism.” Got that? Franks’s study is not for everyone, but for this recovering philosophy major: catnip.
[2] Franks begins in ancient Greece where she hears the Delphic oracle command Gnothi seauton. So she moves backward from Eliot’s Jazz Age to the golden age of classical Western philosophy. She highlights Plato’s distinction between doxa (appearance) and to en (being). The book can be read as a mournful meditation on how the former came, disastrously, to dominate over the latter. Bringing things into our present postmodern context, she organizes her material around three types of self that abandonment of our creator-linked self has bequeathed us: doxic (illusory), liquid, and empty. They all refer to a rootless search for the genuine, a personhood grounded in virtue instead of its mere signaling. “Liquid bodies, empty selves and doxic life create an incoherent identity.”
[3] Along the way the author surveys Continental heavyweights like Heidegger, Locke, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser and Deleuze. To cite one example, she shows how Heidegger’s “anti-Jew self” is unrestrained by any claim except as it is rooted in Das Volk. On the side of antidote, she leans heavily on Hans Urs von Balthasar. I looked in vain for my college crush Merleau-Ponty and his illuminating ens soi and pour soi schema, as I did for Whitehead and process proposals; analytic philosophy is represented, only briefly, by Wittgenstein. Also MIA is John Milbank, whose magisterial Theology and Social Theory repays sustained attention. For a literary reference, I would point to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930-43).
[4] Lurking in the shadows, not largely but significantly, was our favorite Augustinian monk—Martin Luther. George Lindbeck pointed out that the Luther’s existential tentatio, his identity crisis, was shared by millions who responded to the Reformation by embracing individual choice in politics, religion and economics. Hier stehe ich resounded throughout the continent, vastly abetted by the printing press.
[5] Those who have sat, latterly, at the reformer’s feet might turn to his focus on vocation as an alternative to the fluff-stuffed, hollow self. Our identity is received, bestowed, by grace, in baptism, extra nos, and comes with a summons to neighbor-love in the paradox of an emptying that fills. The call comes from the triune God whose very being is relational and whose earthly expression could empty himself precisely because he was full.
Rev. Bruce Wollenberg, PhD. is a retired pastor living in Santa Barbara.