<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We are the hollow men<\/p>\n
We are the stuffed men<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
[1] This Lost Generation lament for selves in search of authenticity is taken up by Catholic University of America\u2019s Angela Franks in a deeply researched elegy for \u201cthe identity crisis in the West: the crisis of the subject that resists being fixed.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Hers is an accomplished inquiry into how Western philosophy has enabled this evanescent person to come about.\u00a0 Caveat emptor: it\u2019s a resolutely philosophical<\/em> treatise, deep, demanding and not for casual eyes. \u201cDeleuze\u2019s Spinogistic Nietzscheanism.\u201d\u00a0 Got that?\u00a0 Franks\u2019s study is not for everyone, but for this recovering philosophy major: catnip.<\/p>\n [2] Franks begins in ancient Greece where she hears the Delphic oracle command Gnothi seauton<\/em>.\u00a0 So she moves backward from Eliot\u2019s Jazz Age to the golden age of classical Western philosophy.\u00a0 She highlights Plato\u2019s distinction between doxa<\/em> (appearance) and to en<\/em> (being). The book can be read as a mournful meditation on how the former came, disastrously, to dominate over the latter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They all refer to a rootless search for the genuine, a personhood grounded in virtue instead of its mere signaling.\u00a0 \u201cLiquid bodies, empty selves and doxic life create an incoherent identity.\u201d<\/p>\n [3] Along the way the author surveys Continental heavyweights like Heidegger, Locke, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser and Deleuze.\u00a0 To cite one example, she shows how Heidegger\u2019s \u201canti-Jew self\u201d is unrestrained by any claim except as it is rooted in Das Volk<\/em>.\u00a0 On the side of antidote, she leans heavily on Hans Urs von Balthasar.\u00a0 I looked in vain for my college crush Merleau-Ponty and his illuminating ens soi<\/em> and pour soi<\/em> schema, as I did for Whitehead and process proposals; analytic philosophy is represented, only briefly, by Wittgenstein.\u00a0 Also MIA is John Milbank, whose magisterial Theology and Social Theory<\/em> repays sustained attention.\u00a0 For a literary reference, I would point to Robert Musil\u2019s The Man Without Qualities<\/em> (1930-43).<\/p>\n [4] Lurking in the shadows, not largely but significantly, was our favorite Augustinian monk\u2014Martin Luther. \u00a0George Lindbeck pointed out that the Luther\u2019s existential tentatio<\/em>, his identity crisis, was shared by millions who responded to the Reformation by embracing individual choice in politics, religion and economics.\u00a0 Hier stehe ich<\/em> resounded throughout the continent, vastly abetted by the printing press.<\/p>\n [5] Those who have sat, latterly, at the reformer\u2019s feet might turn to his focus on vocation as an alternative to the fluff-stuffed, hollow self.\u00a0 Our identity is received, bestowed, by grace, in baptism, extra nos<\/em>, and comes with a summons to neighbor-love in the paradox of an emptying that fills.\u00a0 The call comes from the triune God whose very being is relational and whose earthly expression could empty himself precisely because he was full.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s Angela Franks in a deeply researched elegy for \u201cthe identity crisis in the West: the crisis of the subject that resists being fixed.\u201d\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n